Sogeti USA
Seize
the
Cloud
A Manager’s Guide to Success with Cloud Computing
For hype-weary IT and business man-
agement, this book will be a breath of fresh
air. We all know that cloud is the future of
commoditized IT (not all IT), but how do
we get there, and how do we make sure it
all hangs together? The worst thing any
manager could do is listen to the industry
hype that once again promises a new IT
utopia. This book deals with the real issues
and offers a mature roadmap for cloud
adoption—no organization should embark
on a cloud strategy without it.
Martin Butler
Founder of Martin Butler Research
In this book Erik van Ommeren and
Martin van den Berg break out the most
important concept of cloud computing, how
it works within your enterprise and how to
plan for it. I would recommend this book to
anyone who needs to both understand cloud,
and deﬁne a strategy.
David Linthicum
CTO Blue Mountain Labs
Threaded with real-world stories, tough
questions, and pragmatic advice, this book
is an essential guide for business leaders
tackling the next great computing revolution.
Don’t leave home without it.
Emily Nagle Green
Chairman, Yankee Group Research, and
author, Anywhere
A Manager’s Guide
to Success with
Cloud Computing
Seize
the
Cloud
Cloud is here and ready to be used. It is
now one of the many concepts available
to organize IT, and it is here to stay. The
conversation about cloud computing has
turned away from pure technology, and
now it focuses on the business side, the
economics and the governance aspects.
There are still some challenging questions
around cloud, but nothing that dismisses
the concept as a whole. For example, the
question is no longer “is cloud secure,” but
more “can I use this speciﬁc cloud solution
for my speciﬁc situation.” And as soon as
we become speciﬁc, the mist of the cloud
evaporates: it becomes very clear that good
concepts, services and solutions are within
arms’ reach for everyone.
Seize the Cloud will serve as your guide
through the business and enterprise archi-
tecture aspects of cloud computing. In
nine chapters, and in a down-to-earth way,
cloud is woven into the reality of running
an organization, managing IT and creating
value with technology. Along the way, the
concept of business technology is intro-
duced as a new kind of interaction between
business and IT. Also, a new look at the eco-
nomics of IT is described. The book strikes a
positive note without turning evangelical or
overly optimistic: it does not shy away from
the barriers that could stand in the way of
adoption. To provide a ﬁrm dose of reality,
the book explores eleven cases in which
leading organizations share insights gained
from their experiences with cloud.
The authors and contributors of this book
have a proven track record on the topic and
several have written prior books on cloud
computing, enterprise architecture, SOA,
infrastructure architecture, quality assurance
or business process analysis and design. The
sponsoring organizations, IBM and Sogeti,
have a strong business partnership and
work together in serving clients using many
innovative technologies, among which cloud
computing plays an important role.
Seize the Cloud
A Manager’s Guide to Success
with Cloud Computing
Erik van Ommeren • Sogeti USA
Martin van den Berg • Sogeti Netherlands
With:
Jean-Michel Bertheaud • IBM France
Per Björkegren • Sogeti Sweden
Rik den Boogert • Sogeti Netherlands
Flavien Boucher • Sogeti France
Bernard Huc • Sogeti France
Daniël Jumelet • Sogeti Netherlands
Mark Kerr • IBM UK
Alfonso Lopez de Arenosa • Sogeti Spain
Eric Michiels • IBM Belgium
Ron Moerman • Sogeti Netherlands
Brian Naylor • IBM UK
Bert Noorman • Sogeti Netherlands
Liam Ó Móráin • Data Fonics Germany
Paul Poelmans • Sogeti Belgium
Ewald Roodenrijs • Sogeti Netherlands
Pascal Sire • IBM France
Jimmy Sterner • Sogeti Sweden
Sunil Talreja • Sogeti USA

2011
IBM and Sogeti
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Share
Alike 3.0 Unported. To view a copy of this license, visit
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/ or send a
letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor,
San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0

The authors, editors and publisher have taken care in the
preparation of this book, but make no expressed or implied
warranty for any kind and assume no responsibility for
errors or omissions. No liability is assumed for incidental
or consequential damages in connection with or arising out
of the use of the information or programs contained herein.
The following terms are trademarks or registered trade-
marks of International Business Machines Corporations in
the United States, other countries, or both: Component
Business Model and IBM. DYA is a registered trademark of
Sogeti Nederland bv in the United States, other countries,
or both.
The opinions expressed are the collective ones of the
authors team and do not mean any oﬃcial position of the
sponsoring companies.
2011 IBM and Sogeti

production LINE UP boek en media bv, Groningen, the Netherlands
design Jan Faber
editing Susan MacFarlane
ﬁnal editing Minke Sikkema
cover photo Sunsine and Shadow Arch (www.fickr.com > Ross2085)
ISBN 978-90-75414-32-5
Contents
Acclaim for Seize the Cloud 6
Foreword by IBM 8
Foreword by Sogeti 9
1
The New Business Reality 11
Case Shell International 17
Case Hyatt Hotels 19
2
A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing 23
2.1 Introduction 23
2.2 The Economy Created the Cloud 24
2.3 Cloud Represents All That is Good in IT 26
2.4 Everybody is Pushing You to the Cloud 27
2.5 Cloud is for the People 28
2.6 Of All Those Affected, the CIO Feels It Most 29
2.7 “Short-Term Cloud Thinking” Will Cost You More Than It Returns 32
2.8 There Is One Internet, But There Are Many Clouds 33
2.9 First Stop: Hybrid Cloud 33
2.10 Sorry, You Don’t Have a Private Cloud Just Yet 35
2.11 Alas, the Cloud May Not Be So Green After All 35
2.12 Your Clients, Employees and Competitors Are Ahead of You Already! 36
2.13 We Have More Technology Than We Can Muster Today 37
2.14 Conclusion 38
Case Bambuser 39
3
Business Innovation Through Cloud Computing 41
3.1 Introduction 41
3.2 From Information Technology to Business Technology 41
3.3 Are You Already a Business Technology Company? 46
3.4 How Business Technology and Cloud Computing Are a Perfect Match 47
3.5 Conclusion 50
Case Lighthouse Capital 52
4
Cloud Economics 55
4.1 Introduction 55
4.2 The Overall Impact of Cloud Computing 55
4.3 The Impact of Cloud on the Flow of Goods and Money 59
4.4 The Impact of Cloud on Different Types of Providers and Consumers 62
4.5 Conclusion 68
Case ICTU 70
Case Peracton 73
5
The New IT Constitution 75
5.1 Introduction 75
5.2 Drivers for the New IT Constitution 76
5.3 New IT Capabilities for the Cloud Era 80
5.4 Mapping the New IT Capabilities for the Cloud 82
5.5 The Cloud and Service Management—ITIL and the Cloud 88
5.6 Conclusion 91
Case Windesheim 93
6
Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake 95
6.1 Introduction 95
6.2 Cloud Computing Requires Coherence and Integration 95
6.3 Dynamic Enterprise Architecture 97
6.4 People Make the Practice 101
6.5 Principles First 102
6.6 Reference Models Provide a Map for Cloud Adoption 103
6.7 Focus on Function Instead of Construction 111
6.8 Conclusion 115
Case ING 116
7
Overcoming the Barriers 119
7.1 Introduction 119
7.2 Weighing the Issues 119
7.3 Cloud Can Never Be Secure 120
7.4 Our Regulations Prohibit the Cloud 121
7.5 Cloud Is Too Expensive 122
7.6 Cloud Has No Business Value 122
7.7 It’s Easy to Get in, Impossible to Get out 123
7.8 Integration Is Impossible 124
7.9 Migration to the Cloud Is Too Hard 124
7.10 Too Diffcult to Keep Control 125
7.11 Performance and Stability are Insuffcient 125
7.12 The Reputation Risk Is Too Large 126
7.13 The Cloud Providers Are Not Guaranteed Future-Proof 127
7.14 Lack of Internal Cloud Expertise 127
7.15 The Systemic Risks Are Too Large for Society 128
7.16 Culture or Overall Reluctance to Change 129
7.17 Conclusion 129
Case Logistics Company 131
Case Trading Firm 134
8
Data: The New Frontier 137
8.1 Introduction 137
8.2 Consumer Data in the Cloud 137
8.3 Change in Mindset 138
8.4 Data Evolution 139
5
8.5 Dumb versus Smart Data 142
8.6 Data in the Cloud 144
8.7 Tapping into the Data Potential for Organizations 148
8.8 Challenges 150
8.9 Conclusion 151
Case Reinier de Graaf Groep 153
9
Creating Your Roadmap 157
9.1 Introduction 157
9.2 Business Changes Toward Cloud Computing 158
9.3 Addressing the Business-IT Interaction 160
9.4 Getting IT Ready for Cloud 166
9.5 Inside-Out or Outside-In? 171
9.6 Learning More About Cloud & Understanding the Full Impact 173
9.7 Cloud in Your Organization 174
9.8 Living in the Cloud 174
About IBM 177
About Sogeti 178
The People Who Contributed 179
References 189
Index 195
Contents
6
Seize the Cloud
Acclaim for Seize the Cloud
The writers have managed to create a well-structured and easy-to-read
book, the biggest challenge for anyone writing a book about a hype thing like
cloud. The most important beneft from the book is that it creates an under-
standing and defnition of cloud from a business perspective. The book has
well-described and interesting practical cases, which in combination with the
theory gives me the foundation for crafting our future cloud strategy.
Göran Bengtsson
CIO Öresundskraft AB (Sweden)
For hype-weary IT and business management, this book will be a breath
of fresh air. We all know that cloud is the future of commoditized IT (not all
IT), but how do we get there, and how do we make sure it all hangs together?
The worst thing any manager could do is listen to the industry hype that once
again promises a new IT utopia. This book deals with the real issues and
offers a mature roadmap for cloud adoption—no organization should embark
on a cloud strategy without it.
Martin Butler
Founder of Martin Butler Research
Developing an emerging-technology strategy requires coordination
across IT; like any strategic IT activity, it has an impact on relationship man-
agement, architecture, delivery, operations, and support. It’s not just about
technology selection but also about IT’s ability to operate IT as a collection of
business services—sourced from internal and external clouds. This book
speaks to this concept.
Bobby Cameron
Vice President, Principal Analyst, Forrester Research Inc.
7
In this book Erik van Ommeren and Martin van den Berg break out the
most important concept of cloud computing, how it works within your enter-
prise and how to plan for it. I would recommend this book to anyone who
needs to both understand cloud, and defne a strategy.
David Linthicum
CTO Blue Mountain Labs
Yankee Group’s research points to the maturation of our global network
into the pervasive, intelligent fabric that businesses need to support cloud-
based computing, allowing them to evolve to Anywhere Enterprises. This
book, rich with all the ambition associated with this exciting new model, but
threaded with real-world stories, tough questions, and pragmatic advice, is an
essential guide for business leaders tackling the next great computing revolu-
tion. Don’t leave home without it.
Emily Nagle Green
Chairman, Yankee Group Research, and author, Anywhere
This book will help considerably. For sure, it contains all the defnitions,
insights and perspectives that get a frm grip on the cloud phenomenon. It’s
all the bible you need, if you like. But more importantly, it is down-to-earth,
pragmatic and action-oriented. This is illustrated by many cases from real life,
telling us about inspiring people and their businesses, already exploring, test-
ing, learning and benefting from the cloud.
Exactly what is needed to put the rubber on the road. Stop evangelizing, start
reading. Then act.
Ron Tolido
CTO Applications Continental Europe, Capgemini
Director, The Open Group
Acclaim for Seize the Cloud
8
Seize the Cloud
Foreword by IBM
During my more than 30 years in the technology industry, I have been fortu-
nate to have played an active role in shaping the innovations that have revo-
lutionized the way technology impacts business. Cloud computing is one of
those innovations. Much more than a way to save on technology costs by shar-
ing computing resources, cloud computing has a profound impact on all types
of institutions from business to education, government and health care.
What makes cloud computing so powerful is that it breaks down barriers
between silo and proprietary applications, both inside and outside an orga-
nization. For the frst time, the entire ecosystem can freely share information
and ideas. New partnerships and ways of thinking will undoubtedly emerge
as students on opposite ends of the world learn together, large and small
governments work together and employees and clients create together.
Cloud computing also makes enterprises smarter by delivering analytics
capabilities that they never had before. With this, businesses can turn their
raw data into valuable information that provides insight and predicts out-
comes. This level of reliable information enables organizations to make better,
more accurate business decisions.
Built on the wisdom of services-oriented architecture, cloud computing fur-
ther accelerates agility and fexibility. Since businesses can tap into resources
beyond what they own, they can respond more quickly to business needs and
changing conditions. IT departments can better balance their costs, risks and
time-to-delivery.
Cloud computing is not a new buzzword. Its foundation has existed for years
and it will continue to set the pace for how technology will be used, consumed
and delivered, long into the future. As you read through this book, you will
come to more fully understand the impact and implications of cloud comput-
ing for your enterprise and see it as a way to leverage technology to make your
business a leader.
Steve Mills
Senior Vice President and Group Executive
IBM Software and Systems
9
Foreword by Sogeti
Using computing power in the same way we use electricity? It makes so much
sense, doesn’t it. When you need it, you turn it on, and when you don’t need
it anymore, you turn it off. You only pay for the power you actually use, with-
out having to worry about sudden peaks in demand or huge upfront invest-
ment in hardware and software. Computing should have been set up as a
utility in the frst place. It should have been a no-brainer to implement it. And
why stop there, at the hardware level? Why not set up a similar service for
storage, network connectivity or even software applications? It would cer-
tainly take away a lot of unwanted complexity and create tremendous pos-
sibilities for effciencies.
This is—in a nutshell—the thought behind cloud computing, and explains
much of the deafening hype that is going on around this new computing
model. However, it is important to realize that cloud computing in its essence
is not new. Already in 1963 there was talk about utility-style computing, and
since then the concept has surfaced in many forms only to disappear again
under the waves of technological progress. Although the concept has always
been clear, all the necessary elements to make cloud computing a mainstream
success were simply not available.
But this time around it is different. Bringing together many innovations, cloud
computing and cloud services have gained mainstream popularity in the con-
sumer space and are now quickly spreading into the enterprise world. Shar-
ing and storing huge amounts of photos online has become the norm, solving
challenges around security and reliability in a much better way than an indi-
vidual ever could. Making a video available to the world no longer requires a
broadcast network; it is done using a readily available service that is (so far)
offered for free. And email has truly become a commodity that is consumed
by the millions through an online service that is fnanced completely through
advertising.
However promising cloud computing might seem, we have to realize that
complexity hardly ever disappears. It cannot be reduced, only hidden. This
simple fact should be printed as a disclaimer on the “wrappers” of every cloud
offering and service. Yes, cloud computing is “oversold” by overly enthusiastic
optimistic suppliers, but is also “overbought” by people who (want to) believe
that simple solutions to complex problems do exist.
10
Seize the Cloud
This book describes how the concept of utility computing has been brewing
and maturing in small advances that now add up to the cloud revolution. It
discusses the vast opportunities that come with this fourth model for comput-
ing after the mainframe, client/server and the web. It describes the continuing
trend of virtualization of technology in support of business and looks at how
this trend will eventually start to virtualize business processes in the not too
distant future. But what the book also does is explain that nothing comes for
free. Cloud computing involves trade-offs that are too important to leave up
to the technologists. The owners of business processes will need to get involved
to make the most out of this new wave. The authors make the case for embrac-
ing cloud computing as more than a technology change. It describes that,
especially for a CIO or enterprise architect, the changes on the horizon are
promising and exciting, but at the same time can be daunting. Will you lose
control or fnally become part of the innovation cycle of your organization?
(As you will fnd out, the answer to that question is “a bit of both”.)
I would like to invite you to read this book, use it to craft your strategy and
engage with the authors directly to continue the conversation, to look at cloud
in the context of your organization and to deepen our mutual understanding
of what this next revolution will mean to 21st century business.
Michiel Boreel
Chief Technology Offcer
Sogeti
11
1
The New Business Reality
If you are an IT decision maker, then cloud computing will change your role
and your relevance to your organization, but in ways that you probably don’t
expect. By too many, cloud is still perceived as an IT infrastructural matter
that is best left to the technicians. This observation was one of the important
reasons for writing this book. Cloud must be used as a much more strategic
opportunity, and right now is the best time to start doing so. In your organiza-
tion, you can now position cloud computing in such a way that it will help you
outcompete and outperform your competitors. Your active role in this trans-
formation will be crucial and personally rewarding.
You probably know how cloud can help you lower cost, reduce overhead
capacity and how that will make you achieve your ever present cost-cutting
goals. You may even be thinking about using cloud computing to improve
“agility” and time to market: faster response to business demands. But that’s
not it. That is not the big impact of cloud. These are undoubtedly great goals
to pursue, and cloud will help you achieve them. But in a couple of years we’ll
have seen a much bigger impact of cloud; an impact that transforms the busi-
ness reality.
A time of transformation
In today’s business environment, it seems that unpredictability and highly
dynamic markets have become the norm. In their book Chaotics, Philip Kotler
and John Caslione (Kotler and Caslione 2009) state that the world of com-
merce and business is in a state of transition and will never be the same again.
The latest recession marked a clear paradigm shift. The economy is moving
from a pattern of predictable cycles of prosperity and recession into a much
more turbulent world where highs and lows appear with greater frequency,
which is to some extent an effect of ongoing globalization. This has become
the new world of business: international, connected and chaotic.
In this context, cloud computing is not simply changing the way we do tech-
nology; it is changing the way we do business. In much the same way that
social media has completely changed marketing, advertising and even news
12
Seize the Cloud
and public opinion, cloud computing is changing business, changing products
and services, changing markets and even changing innovation itself.
It’s hard to overemphasize the potential effect of the transformation to cloud
computing. Nicholas Carr is quoted everywhere in this regard. He wrote the
book The Big Switch (Carr 2009). In this book he predicts that in the coming
decade or so corporate IT will be more or less “switched off” in favor of cloud
resources. In this scenario, the time and attention currently required to main-
tain the commodity components of your business would decrease dramati-
cally. You could start to focus on what creates real value for the organization:
the innovation process (and culture) itself, where technology is no longer a
barrier.
From product to service
Another effect of cloud computing is that the products we use and create turn
into services. Here a new vendor-client relationship comes into view: one
based on continuity, recurrence and trust. Just try to sell a service that doesn’t
do what you promise: the client will simply stop using it. We also talk about
services in a different way than we talk about products: services are generally
marketed in terms of what they do rather than what they are: we make the
decision at a higher level of abstraction. In reality, this move to cloud comput-
ing will result in a more dynamic set of partners that will need to be managed,
or better, kept engaged. And the services you use will become an integral part
of the services you offer to your own clients. The shared responsibility
demands shared goals, shared risks and shared benefts. This introduces a
new kind of market where pricing can continually fuctuate, and price may be
based less on the size of a solution and more on the value provided and how
many competing offerings there are to choose from. In this market, an IT
manager could become something similar to a corporate venture capitalist.
A corporate venture capitalist
When we view IT as a business, it may be managed in the model of a venture capital-
ist striving for the best return on investment while at the same time exploiting market
opportunities. Cloud computing makes it possible to invest in a vast set of business
solutions (services) and rely on the law of averages, which says it’s better to invest in
a broad series of initiatives than to pour all the capital into one. The returns on those
13
1 The New Business Reality
initiatives that prove successful are more than enough to pay for the losses on those
initiatives that fail.
The overall return on invested capital will surpass the expected return from traditional,
slower and less broad business solution development.
Another investment approach that cloud computing makes possible is a bootstrap
approach: a small initial investment may get your business going, then reinvesting
the proﬁts from each sale will enable you to grow your business. Especially for smaller
companies, this approach can be very attractive.
With technology and processes already spreading inside and outside the
organization, we’ve reached a point where truly we need to start thinking in
systems of systems. And since every business activity is taking place in this
connected ecosystem, we need to rethink our business concept itself. We need
to start thinking in businesses built from other businesses.
Seen in this light, it is clear that cloud computing is not a goal in itself: it
enables your company to be part of the ecosystem. Clearly, you cannot afford
to ignore cloud computing. In an ecosystem of connected companies, the ones
that do not participate cannot win. If your systems are not suited for transac-
tional interaction, you will not get the business. If your organization is not
capable of maintaining good service relationships (keeping your partners and
customers happy enough to stay with you), then you will lose your market
share.
When your company is part of this ecosystem, it is not a one-way street. You
could just as easily become a service provider instead of only being a service
consumer. You can open up parts of your business to the partners in your
ecosystem: if you have data that is attractive to others or if you have unique
expertise in performing certain calculations, you could make these available
through commercially viable services and extend your business.
Business technology
Finally there is the impact of technology on the business itself. With tech-
savvy users, clients and management, business decisions are increasingly
becoming technology decisions. Many business processes are so technologi-
cally enhanced that we are in fact running Cyborg businesses: business and
technology are interwoven. We have moved from information technology to
14
Seize the Cloud
business technology. Technological innovation and business innovation are
synonymous, and technology brings direct business opportunities. And there
are lots of opportunities here: at the moment there are many innovations
available that have not yet been fully embraced by organizations or society.
We have yet to realize the opportunities they present.
It may sound a bit far-fetched or futuristic, but most of this is happening
today: people and companies are becoming smarter in using technology. Mar-
keting technologies, for example, are almost completely in the hands of the
business decision-makers, not IT (Woods 2010). There are even companies
who have no internal IT anymore. It does not make business sense to fght
this inevitable shift; your company size, industry or even how innovative you
are today cannot keep you immune from this change.
Where cloud computing can contribute to business innovation
Some examples:
Compete in a global “low price” market, with high volume and low margin. •
Speed up innovation by engaging customers and partners, and be the ﬁrst to •
market a hot item.
Monetize all parts of your business. Any system, resource or process that is valu- •
able for someone else can be sold as a service (B2B or B2C).
Monetize your data. Turn existing data into usable information and identify new •
business opportunities for yourself or sell the information to others.
Simplify the on-boarding of new customers. Use a payment structure that attracts •
new customers, for example through free trials and free services that can be
upgraded.
Win in “turns.” Increase responsiveness to quickly adapt in downturns (and •
upturns) to get ahead of the competition.
The roles of CIO and IT
In recent years, the role of the CIO has been a subject of much discussion.
About how he could be an innovator or a catalyst for change. In reality, not
much of that has materialized: most often the CIO is still perceived as the
person keeping IT in order while trying to reduce costs. This will not change
overnight. The most realistic scenario is a slow shift towards the innovator
role, which would ultimately be rewarding both for the company (since tech-
15
1 The New Business Reality
nological innovation is business innovation) and for the CIO personally
(expanding opportunities rather than just operations).
Now is the perfect time to start that shift. There is still time to develop an IT
department that is trained and ready for its new role, that adapts quickly with
the business side and becomes a department famous for saying “Yes” instead
of saying “No.” Then replace whatever makes sense with a cloud alternative,
and aggressively start connecting with others.
The most important focus from the start must be a process oriented one. Cre-
ate the right processes that enable quick responses while preventing future
spaghetti resulting from a series of quick solutions. Design your governance
and enterprise architecture not from the perspective of risk management, but
from the perspective of enabling best-in-class customer service. Keep it light-
weight and dynamic. Start comparing yourself to external service providers
and make sure that you win the comparison every time. In simple terms, start
applying what you know already. You may cautiously want to wait, thinking
there will be a better time, but that is false hope. There is no reason to wait.
The world will not become less volatile. Budget pressures will remain and
technology will keep on evolving. The sooner you start experimenting, the
sooner you will climb the learning curve and develop a full appreciation of
how cloud computing will change your business, your role and your future.
Reading guide
The rest of this book will introduce you to everything you need to get started.
“Chapter 2: A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing” will give you more
food for thought, while covering the basic concepts of cloud computing. “Chap-
ter 3: Business Innovation Through Cloud Computing” will make the case for
embracing business technology and the effect it has on IT as we know it. Then
we will dive into the economic model, describing the parties and interactions
of cloud computing in “Chapter 4: Cloud Economics,” followed by how busi-
ness and IT work together and the impact of cloud computing on the internal
IT department in “Chapter 5: The New IT Constitution.”
Since integration and reducing enterprise risk will be essential in anything
related to cloud, “Chapter 6: Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake” details
how enterprise architecture plays a role, and how you can employ it while
remaining pragmatic and nimble. “Chapter 7: Overcoming the Barriers” will
16
Seize the Cloud
put some supposed barriers in perspective and counter any unrealistic hype
or negativity that may still surround cloud.
“Chapter 8: Data: The New Frontier” is giving you insight into the question of
what happens next, when cloud is omnipresent and data is more openly
shared. And fnally “Chapter 9: Creating Your Roadmap” will help you put
together your own journey to the cloud, with some concrete steps and point-
ers on how to advance.
In between these chapters you will fnd case studies based on interviews with
CIO’s from companies that have started to embrace cloud computing. In these
tales of the real experiences of a wide range of companies, you will read how
they solved their issues, found value, and became satisfed (or not) with cloud.
With this combination of vision, approach and real-life experiences, we give
you a strong foundation for seizing the opportunity that is the cloud.
17
Case Shell International
Shell International Doing Groundwork
to Create Pure Cloud Computing Model
Cloud to Serve as Default Environment
for IT Services Going Forward
When it comes to cloud computing, Shell International B.V. is moving full steam
ahead. With contracts already in place to integrate cloud services from Microsoft
and Amazon Web Services with its own internal IT service environment, Shell’s
strategy is clear: Anything that can run in the cloud should, in fact, do just that.
Except for the mission-critical applications with the greatest availability require-
ments and most sensitive data, everything is a candidate. “The cloud is default,”
says Johan Krebbers, VP of architecture and group IT architect.
If that strategy sounds cavalier, it’s only because in Krebbers’ view, the cloud is
nothing special. Rather, it’s a natural step in the evolution of IT and should be
considered an important tool that carries with it the same requirements—creating,
maintaining, provisioning and managing—that are normally associated with more
traditional IT resources. And for users, it should be completely transparent.
The goal, says Krebbers, is to create a hybrid environment of public cloud appli-
cations and traditional IT services, running on an infrastructure-as-a-service
(Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud) and accessible via a single-sign-on, Web-
based interface. To date, deployed cloud services have been limited to specifc
production environments, such as SharePoint development, while the company
has availed itself to one-off software-as-a-service offerings such as Salesforce.
com. Eventually, however, users will access everything they need from that uni-
fed interface.
“For a business user it is a complete black box whether a service at the end is
delivered by the internal IT department, one of the traditional infrastructure
service providers or one of the cloud providers,” Krebbers says.
The Road to Flexibility Does Not Go Through Traditional IT
Like many companies experimenting with cloud computing, Shell sees the cloud
as a path to new levels of business agility as the company becomes increasingly
able to deploy services much more quickly—services that offer added fexibility
in comparison with the applications they replace. But Shell also sees benefts
18
Seize the Cloud
in offering its employees business versions of the kinds of tools that are already
available to consumers—things such as web-based email and social networking.
What Shell is not interested in doing is either establishing its own cloud-enabled
data center, or turning to one of the big IT services frms to host its service envi-
ronment. Krebbers says those options—favored by many companies that aren’t
comfortable with the perceived risks of true cloud computing—simply can’t
deliver the fexibility and infnite capacity that cloud providers can, and at a much
lower cost.
“The private cloud is nonsense since some critical cloud components cannot be
delivered here,” says Krebbers. “Cloud providers are much more fexible than
traditional IT service providers.”
Company Kicking the Tires to Ensure Readiness of Cloud Strategy
Before Shell can achieve its cloud vision, however, it is being careful to mitigate
any potential risks. It’s performing tests in the areas of high performance comput-
ing and storage to determine the extent to which the cloud can be tapped for both.
Additionally, as part of its contracts with Amazon and Microsoft, the company has
access to SAS 70 audit results (as performed by an external auditor) to ensure
that both vendors have the adequate controls and safeguards needed to protect
their customers’ data and services.
Shell also has set up a cloud computing Centre of Excellence with one of its key
suppliers to cope with cloud-related challenges, such as how to handle issues
such as security, active directory and application housekeeping. Through the
centre, Shell and its supplier will work together to develop standards, support
cloud projects and manage the creation and delivery of services.
It may sound as if Shell is going to great lengths to make sure it’s on the right
path, cloud-wise, and that’s with good reason. The company envisions the cloud
giving it the ability to deliver more fexible services to business users in the most
convenient possible way, rendering them as internal services made available
across the organization with a single interface.
It’s a grand vision—and one that warrants the ground work Shell is doing to
ensure that it progresses as planned.
19
Case Hyatt Hotels
Hyatt Hotels’ Traditional Approach to
the Cloud Delivering Business Agility
Hotelier’s Journey Started with
Long-Ago Decision to Outsource IT
Hyatt Hotels Corp. hasn’t had to make the decision to jump into cloud computing—
it’s been journeying into the cloud since long before anyone was calling it that.
For all intents and purposes, Hyatt began its cloud journey 16 years ago, when
the company outsourced the bulk of its IT staff, eventually entrusting the hosting
of its primary reservations system to the same IT outsourcer. What’s known today
as cloud computing was still a long way off, but those moves established an IT
philosophy that has become the foundation of Hyatt’s cloud strategy.
“We don’t want to be in the information technology business,” says CIO Mike
Blake. “So what we do is get people who can manage our information technology
needs.”
That’s why all these years later, Hyatt’s legacy reservations system is still hosted
by the same IT outsourcer. By the end of the year, Hyatt will have a backup to that
system running in a German data center run by Amadeus, which hosts one of the
travel industry’s huge booking platforms, known as a “global distribution system.”
Hyatt’s reservation system is one of just two legacy components remaining in the
company, the other being a group sales tool, which is also hosted, and for which
Blake says there is simply not an alternative on the market, cloud or not.
Cloud Strategy Driven by Desire for Reliable Network
Outside of those legacy systems, Hyatt operates with an increasingly modern
cloud computing mindset. With an IT staff of just 43 people supporting a global
hospitality company that employs tens of thousands of people at nearly 450 prop-
erties worldwide, it’s no wonder that just about every application Hyatt runs has
been Internet-enabled.
Most notably, the company’s Micros property management, Oracle fnancials and
PeopleSoft HR systems are hosted by providers such as Navisite and AT&T, with
all of them rendered as Web-based software-as-a-service applications. Hyatt
opted to put best-of-breed applications in the hands of those big names to tap
their robust and reliable networks, rather than turning to niche SaaS vendors and
relying on the vagaries of the public Internet.
20
Seize the Cloud
“So often, we take the network for granted,” says Blake. “You need to make sure
your speeds are appropriate, because latency is inexcusable. People get very
upset when apps are rendered offsite and they’re slower.”
Hyatt Uses Old-School Negotiation Strategies for
Cloud Procurement
Despite its penchant for traditional hosting arrangements, Hyatt is experimenting
with more nimble cloud technologies, as well. For instance, the company is tap-
ping the on-demand computing power of Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute
Cloud to quickly establish development environments for new Web sites that then
are managed with a recently deployed content management system residing on
servers hosted by AT&T. The content management system is used only as a Web-
based interface for quickly making changes to Hyatt’s several hundred Web sites,
but that limited functionality is having a big impact, with changes that used to
take weeks now being completed in minutes.
Given Hyatt’s history, it should come as no surprise that the advent of cloud com-
puting offerings like EC2 hasn’t changed the strategic discussion of how to man-
age the company’s IT. In fact, Hyatt has come at cloud computing with a decidedly
old-school approach to negotiating, working out deals that Blake says ensure that
prices fall over time, rather than rising with infation, which is often how cloud
providers structure their deals.
That negotiating strength is a direct refection of Blake’s background as an expert
in IT fnance. In fact, Blake believes that deal-making is evolving into the skill
most required of modern CIOs.
“You want the person who can understand what you need from the cloud and be
able to structure a deal such that you got the best rate, not only now, but in the
future,” says Blake. “At the end of the day, it’s procurement and vendor manage-
ment that becomes a core competency and a differentiator.”
CIO Characterizes Hosting-Intensive Model as
“Cloud Cheating”
To some, it may sound like a stretch to call much of what Hyatt is doing “cloud
computing,” and even Blake admits that what Hyatt is doing is “cloud cheating.”
The way he sees it, users don’t care how an application is rendered; rather, they
simply want to be able to put data to use in the most convenient way possible,
and as quickly as possible. In that sense, ensuring the performance and reliabil-
21
Case Hyatt Hotels
ity of the network can become more important than the way applications are
rendered.
“I don’t have to go to an explicit cloud provider to be in the cloud,” he says. “Any-
one can have a warehouse and a box, throw a T-1 in there and call themselves
the cloud.”
What matters most to Blake is how Hyatt uses the data its applications generate.
Whether that data comes from a hosted application or a pure SaaS offering is of
little issue, so long as the company can put that data to use quickly and effciently.
Today, Hyatt’s ability to make the most of its data has made it as nimble as a big
company can hope to be, and it has the cloud in its various forms to thank for
that.
“If you had a house with multiple rooms in it and you wanted to be a hotel, all
you need is a browser, and I can make you a Hyatt Hotel,” says Blake. “It’s an
extremely powerful place to be.”
23
2
A Dozen Bold Statements on
Cloud Computing
2.1
Introduction
Today information technology is at a crossroads once again. With every inno-
vation, including the introduction of the frst computer, companies have had
to choose: adopt now, get ready to adopt, or just wait and see. Cloud computing
presents a similar choice: embrace the new concepts, or stick to the old. But
cloud computing is different. It’s not a new technology or new device, but a
new way of using the technology and devices. It’s a different model, which
requires an analysis at a higher level. It makes us ask how should we do IT,
and fundamentally, how should we do business? This chapter will highlight
some important aspects of cloud computing and along the way we introduce
all the basic concepts that make up cloud computing.
Although there is not a single authority that can exactly defne and prescribe
what cloud computing is, it is helpful to have a common starting point. The
following defnition by Forrester Research is particularly helpful. It contains
all the elements commonly associated with cloud computing:
Cloud computing: “A standardized IT capability (services, software or infrastructure)
delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way” (Ried 2010)
The only key element that is not directly addressed in this defnition is the
scalability or elasticity that cloud computing is supposed to provide. It is indi-
rectly included in the “self service” and “pay-per-use” characteristics. Perhaps
a more complete defnition would say that ideal or “perfect” cloud computing
is “A standardized, often highly elastic, IT capability…” Ultimately, it’s not
debating the defnition that creates value; it’s fnding out how you can use the
different models available for your organization’s beneft. So let’s see what
this new development can bring to your organization.
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Seize the Cloud
2.2
The Economy Created the Cloud
When the Internet (or more precisely, the World Wide Web) reached critical
mass, it wasn’t one single technological innovation that made it possible. It
was the combination of many separate trends and elements that, when put
together, created something that had the enormous potential we see online
today. The components (for example, communications protocols, hypertext
with hyperlinks, and a domain-naming convention and architecture) were all
available and valuable in themselves, but it was the combination that created
the Internet. The introduction of the web browser Mosaic is generally consid-
ered the fnal push that truly launched the web.
A similar thing is happening with cloud computing. The term “cloud comput-
ing” is one in a long line of other terms and acronyms, all indicating more or
less similar developments that create new levels of abstraction, loosening the
bonds between process, software code and hardware. “On-demand,” “grid
computing,” “software-as-a service” (SaaS), but also “service-oriented archi-
tecture” (SOA) and even “object orientation” (OO) were all terms marking our
progress towards ever more fexible and descriptive forms of IT. If you pick
apart the elements that make up the current trends, many concepts were
available in earlier incarnations. Any defnition of cloud computing could
easily be applied to a combination of prior similar themes.
Forrester Research mentions three major trends that, combined and in the
con text of the economic downturn, gave birth to cloud computing (Matzke
2010):
Industrialized 1. IT, through increased commoditization, standardization,
consolidation and globalization.
Tech Populism, a popular culture where technology is consumed by and 2.
focused on end consumers, and is no longer the exclusive terrain of orga-
nizational buyers.
Technology that is embodied in the business, or 3. business technology instead
of information technology.
Industrialization in IT
Throughout the years, IT has been moving away from the one-oﬀ manual processes
to a more mature, scientiﬁc and automated approach. Examples of this increased
maturity are these long-running themes that are evident in cloud computing:
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2 A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing
Thinking about layers and abstractions in software. Object orientation, compo- •
nents, service-oriented architecture, all try to hide the technology as much as
possible and ﬁnd a level of abstraction that is both relevant and stable over time.
The emergence of all kinds of standards is an important part of this develop-
ment.
Looking for parts of the business or technology that have in fact become a com- •
modity. From the outside in, organizations have been trying to save money by
moving away from customized or custom-made software in favor of “commercial-
oﬀ-the-shelf” (COTS) or dedicated service providers for any process or component
that is not adding competitive value.
Increasing hardware • virtualization. In the past few years, the virtualization solu-
tions gained maturity, and using them promised a quick way to save money or
hardware by using virtual machines on top of a more or less integrated hardware
platform. A direct result of thinking in abstractions applied to hardware itself.
A question comes to mind: what triggered the hype? If many of these concepts
were already there, why is cloud computing taking off now? One explanation
is that the hype has been brewing for at least a decade under names such as
SaaS or ASP (application service provisioning), so it was inevitable that after
the SOA hype, SaaS and then cloud computing would follow. Another explana-
tion is that some important software components have now become available
or stable enough to be used for core business processes. Most notably, virtu-
alization software has advanced greatly in recent years. The fnal trigger may
have come from the increasingly self-service approach to provisioning IT, an
approach that we all know from our personal experiences online.
But what truly pushed cloud computing into the limelight were the economic
pressures on IT to save money, become more agile and “fnd a better way” of
doing IT altogether. The trend in IT has been that maintenance costs have
kept on rising year over year, consuming an ever-increasing share of the total
IT costs and leaving hardly any budget for business innovation. This trend
could not continue.
To quote a recent blog post on the topic, “Managing IT is expensive, way too
complicated and rarely a core business function that differentiates most com-
panies. But throw in virtualization software, secure multi-tenancy and the
proliferation of broadband networks—all technologies that weren’t available
until recently—then layer on a heavy dose of economic recession, and cloud
computing becomes not only possible, but very attractive” (Maitland 2009).
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Seize the Cloud
2.3
Cloud Represents All That is Good in IT
Many variations of cloud computing exist, and probably there are cloud imple-
mentations that do not neatly ft any defnition. So why call it all cloud com-
puting? Some variations may not be standardized, some are not scalable and
others are not self-provisioned. Perhaps the one most common denominator
in all manifestations of cloud computing is the distinction between ownership
versus usage of IT assets. Not everything that is used is automatically owned.
Cloud products and services make the sharing of IT assets across projects,
applications or even companies economically and operationally viable.
Changing the ownership of the IT assets brings important advantages. The
provider can specialize and thereby create an economy of scale. The provider
can then promise specialized services, lower price, better performance, higher
reliability, more agility, shorter time to market and better quality. Emergence
of multiple providers can create a competitive market, which should improve
service and reduce prices. At the same time, when the provider is external to
the organization, it also introduces the major complexities that are associated
with cloud computing:
How to guarantee security and reliability (“can I trust the provider?”). •
How to integrate the external and internal assets into one usable solution. •
Most external cloud providers today try to optimize on speed of provisioning
and low cost, which leads to commoditized and highly standardized services:
one size fts all (with sometimes limited confgurability). This is not inherent
in the model: providers could very well choose to create much more custom-
ized services that take longer to provision. Some smaller, local providers are
following this path, while large global players stick to the highly standardized
offerings. A local provider may, for example, offer any specifc version of an
operating system in their cloud, while Amazon or Azure would give you just
one, or a limited choice.
When it comes to paying for the use of services, a pay-per-use model sounds
ideal: you only pay for what you use. On the other hand, it may be very unpre-
dictable, and for budgeting reasons you might prefer a one-time-fee that cov-
ers all. Additionally, pay-per-use can mean many different things. Is that pay
per user? Or per click? Per server? Per transaction? Per dollar of goods sold?
Some argue that costs should be related to the business revenue, but very few
service providers are ready to offer a contract that makes the price completely
dependent on the revenue stream as generated by the user. And while the
27
2 A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing
concept of pay-per-use is certainly part of the cloud theme, it is by no means
exclusively tied to it: remember the ASP’s or even mainframe service
bureaus?
Does all that mean the term “cloud computing” is totally meaningless and
useless? No, on the contrary: by grouping this collection of trends, best prac-
tices and architectural patterns under the one term, it has gained enormous
momentum. Cloud computing has become the name of a type of IT that inte-
grates the latest thinking. It triggers the IT industry, and with it IT users
worldwide, to rethink some of their practices and move towards a more ratio-
nal and robust kind of IT. Instead of saying “you need to think about virtual-
ization” and “you need to think about cost models for IT that align better with
business decisions” and “you need to think about agility and speed of provi-
sioning,” all of that is combined into one: you need to think about the cloud.
Down the line, the elements most relevant for you will pop up, while the “per-
fect” cloud serves as an ideal to strive for. Will cloud computing be the end of
the line? Most likely not. The next post-cloud view will probably include even
more and greater viewpoints on business and IT, without taking away any of
the truths about cloud computing, much like cloud computing succeeded SOA
by incorporating it.
2.4
Everybody is Pushing You to the Cloud
The IT ecosystem as a whole plays a part in any technological innovation. To
understand why cloud computing is now on every agenda, one has to examine
what is driving the vendors and the service providers.
Software vendors love the cloud model. First, it creates new ways to sell their
software. Second, it creates a recurring revenue stream. Third, they expect
that it offers new ways to lock users into some proprietary platform, system
or data format. At the same time, some vendors are scared of the change,
because the new model may decrease their proft margins or give new com-
petitors an entry into the market.
Service providers see cloud computing not only as a new opportunity for
consulting, migrations, and integration projects, but also as a new way to get
“close” to their clients. Offering a service instead of a product means a con-
tinuing relationship instead of a one-project deal. At the same time, traditional
service providers may look at this development with some reserve, for the risk
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Seize the Cloud
of cannibalizing existing revenue seems very real. In a world where every-
body is using commoditized cloud services, how much custom development
business remains?
Then there are the IT industry analysts, who see cloud concepts as delivering
on the promises made during the SOA hype. Analysts are a bit more cautious
this time around, stating that cloud computing remains a major trend but that
mainstream adoption may be slower than initially anticipated.
Within the organization, some forces are also favoring the cloud. Technical IT
people are fnding “web services” throughout their working environments,
making it seductively easy to include external IT components in corporate
solutions. The business side of the organization may start to consider cloud
services on their own, attracted by the simplicity and ease of provisioning.
And of course the CIO and CFO have their own reasons for being interested
in the cloud. They may be looking to improve their time to market, make use
of new functionality from the cloud, or simply better align the costs and ben-
efts of IT. For business users, cloud products and services have clear attrac-
tions: self-provisioning promises solutions without the need to involve the IT
department!
2.5
Cloud is for the People
Thanks to Web 2.0 and the many consumer-oriented solutions that are freely
available on the web, the face of IT itself is changing. Business users have
little patience any more for lengthy implementations with complicated deci-
sion processes. As private users they have become used to opening their
browser and simply signing up for enjoyable and useful services. It has
become commonplace for individuals to register for free conference calling,
meeting places, document sharing, email, video hosting, mapping services or
even personalized dashboards or content-management platforms. Creating
or confguring a recruiting website no longer involves IT. In some companies,
CRM systems have been set up without ever involving the IT department.
The CIO and enterprise architects are very slowly warming to the idea, but
the reality is that the expectations for corporate IT departments have already
changed dramatically. Users expect similar service and speed of deployment
from the IT department that they now get on the public Internet.
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2 A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing
A sunny day … with no clouds
In the personal sphere, it’s hard to imagine what our digital life would
look like without cloud services. Most likely our email would be gone.
There would be no YouTube or any other video-sharing site. Pictures we
uploaded to Flickr or Picasa would be gone. Our online backup solution would no
longer work, and even many multiplayer games would stop working. How often would
you use a computer if your Internet connection were down? If the sun were shining
without a cloud in the sky, what would you do?
Ultimately, this is a good thing: it should improve the long-sought alignment
between business and IT, and it will let business make better decisions as to
where to spend money on IT. Using a market model, business users can see
the service and associated cost and make a decision as to whether to buy (or
rent) it or not. Simple as that! Even though the CIO may worry about integra-
tion, security, auditing, and so on, the IT provisioning experience itself is
seductively simple.
The frst examples of user-initiated cloud solutions were point solutions that
needed little or no integration. With the growth of the market, more solutions
are becoming available that are more industry specifc, more integrated into
the business processes and provide true business value. These cloud services
are not just technology services; they are starting to include complete busi-
ness processes packaged as services. Video hosting is a fairly technical, non-
specifc process, but a recruiting process or expense management, for exam-
ple, are true business processes that can now be outsourced to the cloud.
2.6
Of All Those Affected, the CIO Feels It Most
The role of the CIO is one that is under a lot of debate: should he be an
operational manager, the driver of innovation, or part of the board? How do
CIO and CTO relate, or are they one and the same? In any situation, the CIO
will be the one responsible for providing business with the right IT support,
preferably at the lowest price. In the past, many CIO’s were simply told to cut
their budget year after year, while keeping the business running. This has left
some companies in the “skeletal” situation of “stripped down” IT where little
capacity is available for systemic changes, quality improvement or innovation
at all.
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Seize the Cloud
With the emergence of cloud computing, both the operational side (running
the business) and the innovation side (building the business) are changing:
Self-provisioning users ask for support, guidance and training rather than •
top-down policies set out by the IT department. Reshaping the enterprise
architecture approach to refect this shift will require signifcant change.
The focus in the IT department shifts from offering products and trying to •
keep control to offering services and facilitating their use by the organiza-
tion. A more empowered management style would make sense.
The demand from the business for nicely contained, reusable services will •
grow. This fuels the debate between modernizing existing applications
versus adopting SOA as a leading architectural style. If a user can set up a
new mobile website in a matter of minutes, why does it take the IT depart-
ment months to make the old systems mobile-enabled?
The competition from large vendors providing cheaper email, hosting or •
other solutions will bring new budgetary pressures (and the need to fnd
compelling reasons for not moving these elements into the cloud).
Pay-per-use invites new costing models for IT. •
The cloud introduces yet another option to be considered in any buy- •
versus-build decision, with many new complexities that may make com-
parisons diffcult. Careful planning, including identifying assumptions and
scenarios, becomes essential.
The cloud brings new power to IT, although few people yet appreciate its •
full potential. The CIO should take this opportunity to explore how this new
innovative capacity can position the company ahead of the competition.
The emergence of the cloud could mean that the CIO will treat the internal
IT department as “just another provider” and try to measure them against the
same criteria as external providers: quality, effciency, reliability, cost, speed
of provisioning, etc. As soon as an external provider is better than the internal,
should the external provider take over? Or maybe it’s not that simple. Did we
actually learn some lessons from the heyday of outsourcing?
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2 A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing
Figure 2.1 (Widder 2010)
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Seize the Cloud
2.7
“Short-Term Cloud Thinking”
Will Cost You More Than It Returns
Both the era of outsourcing and the era of the PC have taught us valuable
lessons about the risks that come with some of these changes: once control is
handed over to someone else, it may be hard to get it back; and once some-
thing becomes fragmented, it quickly becomes costly and also hard to con-
solidate. A plaque on the wall of any manager should read: “Don’t make long-
term commitments just for short-term reasons.”
As a side-note on the subject of consolidation, virtual machines have been
touted as a great way to counter the effect of the PC explosion. As a result of
the sudden availability of cheap hardware and software, small servers or even
desktops throughout the organization were running their own little tasks.
Once they were turned into “virtual machines,” they could all be brought back
to the datacenter and run on virtual hardware while performing the same
task: it saves money on hardware and it gives the illusion of integration. Of
course, this is only an illusion: the silos, bad architecture, redundancies, etc.
of the situation remain intact. Although virtual machines may require less
hardware initially, they are so easy to create that the total number of “machines”
will likely exceed the previous capacity.
The same thing is happening with the cloud: it’s easy, readily available and
often inexpensive. It’s hard to prevent the impending rapid expansion and
fragmentation, even though we see it long before it happens. Most IT organi-
zations don’t even have a cloud or SaaS strategy. For example, in an Informa-
tionWeek Analytics survey of 131 SaaS customers, 59 percent say it’s a point
solution, not a long-term strategy (Soat 2010).
Pick the low-hanging fruit? Yes! Forget about structure, long-term agility,
integration? No! The adoption and governance of anything cloud-related
must be guided by the enterprise architecture team. If not, in a couple of years
the corporate data could be spread across many places, the company might
be relying on way too many unreliable partners, the whole conglomerate of
internal and external IT may have become impossible to change, and the
benefts that the cloud once promised will have turned into liabilities. If you
are serious about cloud computing, it should be a long-term vision and strat-
egy. Going to the cloud is not a short-term visit, but a long-term structured
journey.
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2 A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing
2.8
There Is One Internet, But There Are Many Clouds
The people-oriented Internet of hyperlinked webpages feels highly inte-
grated: with one web browser anyone can visit millions of pages, videos, pic-
tures and the like. Most of the Internet conforms to the same architecture.
Naturally, one hopes that the same simplicity applies with cloud services pro-
vided over the Internet or using Internet technology. Ideally, services should
“link” to each other to compose business processes that suit the user. Services
like recruitment, flling all sorts of HR forms, even providing someone with
email and a laptop could all be separate but linked to comprise the whole
on-boarding process.
The reality is that there is not one cloud: the lack of standards makes integra-
tion more diffcult than creating a hyperlink on a webpage. Most likely, any
connection between different services needs to be forged manually. For exam-
ple, synchronizing user login details across multiple platforms is not easy. If
multiple services run on the same cloud platform (for example, the Amazon
cloud platform or Force.com), it will be a bit easier, but still not a trivial task.
And connecting (let alone switching) from one platform to another is def-
nitely not a seamless process yet. Basic technology for connecting and send-
ing data may be there (HTTP and XML), but transactions, semantics, authen-
tication, timing, etc. all need to be manually created.
As a consequence, “the cloud” should be read as shorthand for “a collection of
disparate cloud services.” Over time, we can expect either the service provid-
ers themselves or additional “integration in the cloud” providers to fll the
gaps. New and traditional middleware companies are trying to cater to this
need, but few standards exist even between them.
The conclusion at this time is that in the immature cloud market, selecting a
cloud provider warrants some careful consideration. Unfortunately, this takes
away a bit from the easy provisioning and speed of change.
2.9
First Stop: Hybrid Cloud
Organizations looking to use the cloud theme for a quick gain will frst estab-
lish an internal, private cloud. Perhaps building on previous virtualization
projects, it makes sense to apply the concepts to the organization’s own data-
center frst before including external resources.
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Seize the Cloud
The most likely scenario that companies foresee is that a part of IT will run
internally and a part will run in the public cloud, with the option in between
of a “virtual private cloud.” In a virtual private cloud, the IT hardware physi-
cally resides at a hosting provider but it is dedicated to you. In this “single-
tenant” situation, the hardware would not be shared with others. This is dif-
ferent from the public cloud, where resources are shared among the clients.
The virtual private cloud offers some of the benefts of cloud without the risks
associated with going public all the way, and is very similar to working with a
traditional ASP or hosting provider.
Ideally, combining internal and external services forms a “hybrid” cloud: a
well-integrated cloud where external resources would be available when
internal resources reach their limits (often called “cloud bursting”). When the
“on premise” servers are nearing their maximum performance capability,
external servers jump in and take part of the load. When internal data storage
reaches its capacity, external storage is available instantly. A “hybrid” situation
is therefore more than simply combining internal and external. It adds a layer
of management and integration on top.
Another mixed form is where certain tasks or workloads are in the cloud,
while others remain on premise. In this situation, it’s all about integration and
maintaining features like transaction integrity and regular backups (and
restores!) over the mix of internal and external services. Here too, “hybrid” is
more than simply having a bunch of internal and external services that don’t
talk to each other.
It’s still early days, but one can imagine a cloud governance layer that acts on
a set of rules that combine business, IT and fnancial stakes to determine the
behavior of the hybrid cloud.
But is this a desirable state of IT? Why not move all the way? What is keeping
companies back? There are already some companies that have no internal IT
at all: they have outsourced some parts in the traditional way, they use cloud
services intensively and they work closely with other service providers in
their ecosystem. Some companies don’t even provide their own people with
hardware anymore, leaving employees to choose their own laptop and mobile
phone. What is holding you back?
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2 A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing
2.10
Sorry, You Don’t Have a Private Cloud Just Yet
Not many companies have even a full-fedged internal cloud just yet: they
may have virtualized the hardware, but this is just the frst step. The reality
will be that for an increasing number of IT functions, the internal IT will
compete with external providers.
The external providers are using their economies of scale to drive down all
operational costs: self-provisioning is very nice for the speed of deployment,
but the initial driver was simply to decrease human intervention. The num-
bers can be astounding: the number of people operating a server is getting
close to zero. Google has been said to only have one administrator for 20,000
servers and is aiming for one person per 100,000 servers (Bias 2010). That is
the kind of effciency that internal IT will be competing against, and to achieve
it you need automation. For a cost-effective private cloud you need to optimize
and automate as many IT processes as you can, thereby automatically increas-
ing agility and transparency. There would be very little variable cost: the cost
is comprised of the hardware, licenses and network, with virtually no cost in
human resources.
Ultimately you may introduce the fnal element of your private cloud: a per-
use costing model where business users pay for IT resources based on actual
usage. With these three elements in place, the private cloud would be com-
plete: virtualization, full automation (i.e. self service) and pay-per-use.
Every step along the way has value, and taking one step at a time makes it
achievable. Virtualization saves on hardware, automation saves on people cost
and pay-per-use makes for better business-aligned IT investments, provided
that business users are also learning how to invest strategically in IT.
2.11
Alas, the Cloud May Not Be So Green After All
There is an idea that cloud computing will make IT “green,” which is related
to the concept of improving economies of scale with regard to people per
server: through economies of scale and better utilization, a more energy-ef-
fcient and eco-friendly IT will be possible.
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Seize the Cloud
The discussion around the value of greener technology is interesting in itself,
since many companies seem primarily interested in the money they can save.
(Have you ever seen a company publicly state that “we are spending a lot
more on IT, but it has become a lot more environmentally friendly”?). Regard-
less of the motivation behind it, the ambition to save energy on IT is a valid
one: continuing current trends would lead to a situation where energy and
cooling will make up the main cost of IT.
But will the cloud make IT green? Or will something else happen? History
teaches us that with the commoditization of technology, effciency rises, but
at the same time, cost falls and it becomes easier to use it. Old-fashioned
economics still holds true: lower prices will increase the demand. So while
the amount of energy spent “per task” may decline dramatically thanks to
cloud services, one can expect the number of tasks being sent into the cloud
to increase. Compare this to the search engines on the Internet: datacenters
grew more effcient, increasing the number of servers and leading to more
and better services. The end result is that Google most likely uses more power
year after year (not information they like to share) (Leake 2009).
The only truly green IT coming from the cloud are the datacenters that use
energy from solar, wind and other renewable sources. Thus, in a roundabout
way, the discussion around green IT and the cloud will bring attention to the
topic, which in turn may lead to more service providers choosing to offer truly
green IT.
2.12
Your Clients, Employees and Competitors Are Ahead
of You Already!
Individual users have grown accustomed to cloud computing in the consumer
space and have accepted the risks and usability quirks of online services. Your
employees, your clients and most likely your competitors are using cloud
services every day.
If you are not yet picking the low-hanging fruit, your company is already lag-
ging behind. If you have not yet explored cloud options in a pilot or small
project, your competition is ahead of you. If, for example, the software devel-
opment team is not using the cloud for their Linux projects, they are wasting
corporate resources.
37
2 A Dozen Bold Statements on Cloud Computing
These low-hanging fruits of cloud computing are waiting to be picked:
Software development and test environments. •
Short-term, high performance needs for large one-off calculations or for •
big conversion tasks. Sudden peak loads on public facing servers can be
offoaded into the cloud.
Temporary solutions. Any environment that is temporary with little or no •
need to be integrated and contains no sensitive data, which may be a cam-
paign-related web service, a bridging solution to facilitate a company
merger or a plan in the event of a natural disaster.
Any services that, inherent in their functionality, are best in the cloud and •
outside of the organization, which may be public video hosting, conference
calling, fle sharing, channel collaboration or recruitment.
For start-up companies, but also for companies in developing countries, the
cloud model presents the ideal way to use technology, offering great function-
ality quickly with extremely low upfront investment. Competition from them
can be sudden and strong. With no burden of legacy systems, they are poised
to take advantage of what’s available online. They could cobble together an
online CRM, a content management tool, email, an inventory management
service and an invoicing service, then presto! They are in business!
And you may fnd yourself lagging, but on the other hand, if you were betting
everything on the cloud already, you would be among the leaders. There is still
time to catch the wave.
2.13
We Have More Technology Than We Can Muster
Today
New opportunities that break the model are beyond our imagination. Com-
panies are just beginning to explore what it means to use everything that is
available from the cloud. How can we best use these new collaborative tools?
What can we do with huge public datasets, or extensive datasets shared among
channel partners? What does it mean when every individual user in the enter-
prise can command computing power that is equivalent to that of a super-
computer? New automations, new patterns and new organizations will arise
that know how to beneft from this new reality. Two people in a garage may
start a new company that rapidly overtakes a well-established incumbent
player.
38
Seize the Cloud
The reality is that we have so much technology at our fngertips that technol-
ogy itself is no longer the inhibitor: it might be our own imagination or simply
the end user’s capacity for change. This is where the cloud needs to be an
inspiration and not simply a solution: the cloud not only helps solve some of
the great challenges of IT within organizations, it also makes new things
possible.
2.14
Conclusion
Surely, many more things could be said about the cloud: about the new oppor-
tunities that it brings into reach and the effects that it might have going for-
ward. It may not be the solution to all IT challenges that we would wish it to
be, but it does advance our options and create new business opportunities.
The cloud is not something you can ignore. It needs to be examined, weighed
and tested. These 12 bold statements show the potential and the hope, but
also the disclaimers of reality in a complex technological world. There will be
a sustained need for smart people with vision, ideas and a way to make things
happen. Only with them will the cloud and technology in general be of any
use to an organization.
In the next chapter, we’ll examine this relation between business and technol-
ogy more closely, and we’ll dive into what is called business technology, for
which cloud computing is a great enabler.
39
Case Bambuser
For New Generation of IT Leaders,
There is No Option to Cloud Computing
Bambuser Founder Among Those
For Whom the Cloud is a No-Brainer
Throughout the business world, IT execs are grappling with whether to commit
to cloud computing or not. They ooh and ah over its numerous business benefts,
fret over its perceived weaknesses, and test the waters by using niche cloud ser-
vices or entrusting low-priority applications to cloud service providers.
And as they do, tech-savvy 20-somethings collectively wonder, “huh?”
Måns Adler is one such 20-something. The founder of Swedish mobile video
service Bambuser represents a new wave of technologists who come at IT from
a fresh perspective. They eschew the philosophies and terminologies of tradi-
tional IT—“cloud computing” among them—and instead simply opt to use the
technologies that are abundantly available to them so they can focus on building
consumer services rather than IT environments.
The most obvious such resource is the world of cloud-based services. Just don’t
call it the cloud, or Adler might not follow you. He considers “cloud computing”
to be a stale IT term that means little to him. “From my younger perspective,
there’s never been a different way of going about it,” he says. “It was so clear from
the beginning.”
Cloud Based Services Abound From the Start
The beginning was 2007, when Adler started up Bambuser and began work on
the company’s service, which enables video to be broadcast over the web in near
real time from a mobile phone. The idea that he might have to invest money in
servers and software to create an environment for building and delivering Bam-
buser’s service never even occurred to Adler; rather, he and his founding team
just went online and found just about all the tools they needed.
You name it, and Bambuser uses a free cloud service for it. Email? Bambuser
relies exclusively on Gmail. Phone service? No reason not to use Skype. Word
processing and document sharing? Google Apps works great. Create a private
social network for real-time communication and collaboration? Yammer flled in
nicely. Usage tracking? Thank you, Google Analytics.
40
Seize the Cloud
In fact, Bambuser pays for very few of the technologies it uses. It pays a nominal
monthly fee for FogBugz, an online bug-reporting service; it pays about $1,500 a
month to a Swedish ISP for access to a single server that hosts Bambuser’s devel-
opment environment, and it spends between $2,000 and $6,000 per month to have
its peak video traffc routed through Amazon Web Services’ Elastic Compute
Cloud.
That means it costs just a few thousand dollars a month to run Bambuser’s whole
operation, an eye-popping number that illustrates the value the cloud brings to
startups that can make the best use of the platform. And best of all, Bambuser
users not only wouldn’t care, they wouldn’t have the slightest idea they’re using
a cloud-based service themselves. “As long as you get it right and the users get a
great experience,” says Adler, “they’ll never even think about whether it’s a cloud
service or not.”
Bambuser’s Cloud-Friendly 20-Somethings: IT Staﬀ of the Future
Given the company’s reliance on cloud services, it should come as no surprise
that Adler likes to fll jobs with IT workers in their mid-20s who are like-minded
to him, ones who are accustomed to using Web-based administrative tools. In fact,
all but one of the company’s dozen employees is in their 20s. The lone exception
is CEO Hans Eriksson, a 40-something brought in partly to balance out the staff’s
youth. Yet even Eriksson isn’t interested in whether a technology Bambuser uses
is a cloud service or not. “For him, the only thing that matters is that it works,”
says Adler.
The idea of a technology staff that doesn’t think about whether to use the cloud
or not, but instead just charges ahead with Web-based applications and services,
is a new concept. It challenges the typical IT approach of carefully evaluating
options, running risk-beneft analyses, seeking approval from the board, and
undergoing extensive test periods.
It also signals that once today’s 20-something are making the big IT decisions,
cloud computing no longer will be one of several options—it will be the ONLY
option.
41
3
Business Innovation
Through Cloud Computing
3.1
Introduction
Part of the promise of cloud computing is that technology will become more
business-driven. In this chapter we will discuss the interaction between busi-
ness and technology, and we will show that a shift is taking place from infor-
mation technology to business technology, a shift from IT as a separate entity
to something embedded into everything we do. Cloud computing is part of this
shift. The chapter will describe the effects, and how you can prepare for this
change to create the real business agility that cloud is promising.
3.2
From Information Technology
to Business Technology
Technology* is part of everyday life, in business as much as in our personal
life. Take away the applications, email, networks and Internet from any orga-
nization and it would come to a standstill almost immediately. This is more so
now than ever before: in the days of phone and fax, we could probably do fne
without technology for a day or two. The difference today is more than just
greater dependency: we are no longer doing the same things. Supported with
technology we are starting to do new things that we simply could not do with-
out that technology. And now that technology has found its way into all parts
of our organization, we are asking new things of it. Looking closer at what we
now demand of information technology, it becomes clear that cloud computing
is a good model for provisioning and paying for technology. It will give a boost
to whatever we are doing.
* This chapter does not delve into the hard “machine” technologies that may be part of manufacturing
or operations in some companies. While there is a trend of convergence, the dynamics for that kind of
technology are diﬀerent from what is described here.
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Seize the Cloud
Designing a new car
When thinking about technology and business, one could think of them as
two parts that together make up an organization. Compare this to the early
automobile industry, where the construction of a car was done in two parts:
the frst part was a frame, a sturdy framework with wheels, power train and
suspension; attached to that was the second part, the coachwork of the car.
The coachwork actually contained most of the visible car, but did not bear any
load: the body did not contribute to the strength or basic structure of the car.
This is no longer true. Modern cars are different: the body of the car is part
of the structure itself. Take away the body and there is not enough structure
left to hold the rest in place. The unibody, or monocoque, construction method
is now the primary construction method for passenger cars, making much
lighter and cheaper cars a reality.
Cyborg organizations
Similarly, modern organizations are not businesses on top of (or supported
by) technology, nor are they a frame of technology-free conceptual business
processes to which technology is applied. Instead they have become interwo-
ven, integrated. Take away the technology and there is nothing left. Real-time
inventory and restocking of a supermarket chain can only exist with technol-
ogy. Collaboration across great distances can only be performed if the right
communication technology is in place. Any bank that offers mobile banking,
Internet banking or automated transactions is now selling services that are
in fact technology services. You could say that organizations have become
cyborg organizations: by adopting more and more technology, organizations
have become technological in their very essence and fabric. Technology is part
of an organization’s basic operation (for example, how we communicate inter-
nally or how we pay) but also part of the competitive advantage (how we
approach our customers and how we defne new products). For some compa-
nies, it goes even further, and technology has become an integral part of what
they sell.
Technology defnes how we do and are able to do almost everything, from
marketing to manufacturing, from billing to human resource management.
For people who have only joined the workforce in the past 5 years, it’s impos-
sible to imagine what a company was like before there was such widespread
technology (or with email only). Consider all the ways we use technology:
43
3 Business Innovation Through Cloud Computing
Defning new products, through simulation and research, crowdsourcing •
innovation, and measuring satisfaction and ratings.
Manufacturing, using not just machines but production automation, con- •
fgurable machines and detailed statistics for process optimization.
Delivering services, using web-based interaction for customization and •
customer intimacy, knowledge management, collaboration and delivery.
Automating the supply chain, using real-time insight to manage and syn- •
chronize inventory, billing, etc.
Marketing, using online campaigns, social media, video hosting or web- •
sites. When interacting with your clients, how much is technology and how
much is face time with real people?
Communicating inside the company, using intranet, wiki’s or internal blogs, •
digital newsletters, etc.
Managing human resources with self-service tools for core HR pro- •
cesses.
Billing, using direct links to your bank, payment providers and other ser- •
vice providers.
Working with partners, with collaboration tools, interconnected systems •
and shared data.
Creating strategy and making decisions based on trends, business intel- •
ligence and advanced analytics.
Figure 3.1: A breakdown of how and how much different types of processes in an
organization can be enabled with technology (The Corporate Executive Board Company
2010)
Finance
and HR
Process automation
Production
and Supply
Chain
Customer
Service
Marketing
and Sales
Product/
Service
Innovation
46%
27%
3%
15%
9%
18%
28%
54%
28%
18%
13%
Customer interface
Business intelligence
Collaboration
None
3%
4%
34%
13%
14%
12%
13%
20%
44% 11%
13%
14%
16%
30%
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Seize the Cloud
Technology may be especially visible in larger enterprises that focus on ser-
vices, but it is also making a difference in smaller businesses. Even if you are
a manufacturer dealing with lots of manual labor, the logistics, planning, mod-
eling and sales involve technology today. And as with every innovation, if your
company is not doing it, some competitor will try to beat you to it.
Technology is even part of products
A recent lesson is that the perceived value of physical goods is created through
a technology layer that enhances the product. Producers are using the digital
layer to increase brand awareness and change (improve) perception of the
product through games, extra information, virtual reality, loyalty rewards pro-
grams, and so forth. Car makers earn money with options like navigation
systems or crash-assistance services. So called quick response (QR) codes in
brochures or product manuals connect the buyers’ mobile device directly to
online resources that provide information or social networking for the user,
while giving the producer the added beneft of greater customer intimacy.
For producers this is one of the ways to counter the commoditization of phys-
ical products: innovate through branding and the digital experience, all part
of the so-called “experience economy.” It perhaps goes without saying that the
advances in technology determine the possibilities and competition in this
space. The iPhone launched many new opportunities. Cheap online video
created a new channel. The availability of virtually endless (cloud) resources
has yet to be completely utilized.
Email as a special case
The examples above don’t even mention the most pervasive technology: email.
It is both trivial (“of course everybody relies on email”) and very relevant.
Thanks to cloud computing, several alternatives to email are springing up that
challenge the necessity of email. One of the oft described generational differ-
ences between the “working” population and the college population is that the
latter has stopped using email altogether, replacing it with Facebook wall
posts, Twitter, instant messaging, text messaging and various other means of
communication. (And all of these tools are cloud!) So while email may be
everywhere, thanks to the cloud, alternatives may present themselves that
will change the way you do internal communication, distribute a message or
45
3 Business Innovation Through Cloud Computing
gather feedback on a document. Mobile computing is set to be the next big
game changer that will be cross functional, touching upon everything we do:
do you check your BlackBerry on vacation? That is just the beginning.
New business patterns
When you try to imagine how technology could change your business, it’s
sometimes hard to look beyond the current state. But the real opportunities
may lie just outside the box: What is your business model, and why? What
happens if some technology becomes extremely cheap and easy to provision?
What happens if it costs next to nothing to resell the products or services from
others? What happens in a business world where there are no more secrets,
and links are free? Real innovation often occurs through the adoption of
completely new business models. An interesting way to think about this is to
explore modern business patterns. For example, could you use technology to
embrace a long-tail model (Anderson 2006) for some of your activities? Could
you start selling niche products that generate as much revenue as your cur-
rent top 3 products? Could you mass-customize?
Embracing business technology for even greater goals
We are not yet fully realizing the opportunities that exist today. It’s easy to be
blinded by the small everyday issues so that the larger goal stays out of reach.
Now that businesses and public organizations are “wired” and the cloud has
emerged as a collection of Internet platforms and tools for connecting, inte-
gration and sharing of data and processes, it has become possible to think
about the bigger issues that are going unaddressed. IBM, for one, has launched
a campaign named “Smarter Planet” where pervasive technologies and eco-
systems of companies are urged to work together in solving societal problems
in the felds of transportation, healthcare, environment, education, etc. The
main thought is, what could we accomplish if we all aim to solve a bigger issue
together, crossing organizational boundaries and creating these systems of
systems?
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Seize the Cloud
3.3
Are You Already a Business Technology Company?
It is one thing to have technology embedded into everything we do as an
organization. It is quite another to have true business technology (BT): a view
of technology that fts the reality where technology is no longer seen as qua-
si-independent of the rest of the organization. So, are you there yet?
There is no single test that will tell you if you are using true BT, but there are
some indicators that will give you an idea.
IT BT
Primarily responsible for
IT selection and provi-
sioning is …
IT department Business, with the IT depart-
ment as broker
Technology is imple-
mented through …
Projects Self service or iterative
provisioning
Main focus of the IT dept
is to …
Build things right Build only the right things
CIO’s role is … Responsible for creation and
operation of technology
while reducing cost
Managing a portfolio of
services, some internal and
some external
Technology is marketed
by talking about …
Features & functionality Business outcomes
Enterprise architects
are …
Famous for saying “No” and
causing delay to business
projects
Famous for saying “Yes,”
facilitating, accelerating and
coming up with business
ideas
Functions related to
technology are found …
Only in IT Mostly in IT department for
technical roles, but with
business analysts, workﬂow
and process management
functions in the business
Innovation is … New technology Joint business innovation
Expected value from
technology is to …
Increase productivity Increase market share &
revenue
Business strategy is … Focused on physical prod-
ucts and services ﬁrst
Focused on the digital
dimension of products and
services ﬁrst
Business executives’
knowledge of technology
is …
Basic, as a user Extensive, with deep insight
into trends and business
opportunities
Marketing, business and
technology operate …
Each in their own domain Closely integrated
Technology is measured
by looking at …
Usage, load, uptime Customer interactions,
transactions, revenue
Table 3.1: IT versus BT
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3 Business Innovation Through Cloud Computing
3.4
How Business Technology and Cloud Computing
Are a Perfect Match
This new view of technology as part of the business makes high demands on
how we deal with technology in the enterprise. Cloud computing is a model
that fts surprisingly well with the expectations set by the BT approach:
• Business Metrics. Business is all about sales, revenue, reducing cost and
increasing proft. Success is defned by the long-term proftable growth
that is realized and measured in return on investment. These are the mea-
surements that are important, so they should be the basis of the IT metrics.
The metrics should not be some vague, hard to estimate calculation of pos-
sible cost and ROI, but straightforward calculations, like “60 cents of every
transaction goes to cover IT costs” or, “for every x% increase in sales, we
will have y% increase in IT cost.” This is exactly the realm of cloud comput-
ing: pay for what you use, and scale as needed. Regardless of whether the
technology is coming from a private or a public cloud, this is the model that
resonates within the business.
• Business Terminology. We need to stop talking about technology in techni-
cal terms but think in terms of business outcomes. This was already an
issue when we were still talking about IT and alignment within the orga-
nization, but the advent of business technology has focused the issue.
While the business side is becoming more tech-savvy, IT is becoming more
business savvy, changing the uneven balance of the conversation and mak-
ing it easier to bridge the gap between them. In the end, IT will need to
shift more towards the business side than vice versa. Likewise, when
designing IT, segmentations that are made for technical reasons do not ft
well with the expectations of end users. Business processes and business
functions are the relevant entities to address, leading the conversation
primarily to business services from the cloud rather than to the more
infrastructural or technical cloud components.
• Meaningful Business Innovation versus Common Infrastructure. If you use
expensive, custom-built technology that does no more than support your
basic non-differentiating functions, chances are that the competition will
get the better of you. They are investing in the next great product or ser-
vice, the next level of client intimacy or the next great way to do interactive
marketing. This was already the promise of SOA (loosen things up so that
commodity parts can be replaced by package solutions or services). With
cloud services, the promise has come closer to being a reality: money spent
on technology is expected to create new business opportunities. Swapping
out custom systems for readymade cloud services should free up budget
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Seize the Cloud
and time for true business innovation. The business case for NOT com-
moditizing a large part of your IT every year should be very strong and
constantly challenged to warrant the extra operational cost.
• Business Ownership and Self Provisioning. The core premise of business
technology is that business takes ownership of technology. For this to hap-
pen, business has to be supported and educated on the possibilities of
technology, which is the role of the IT department. Business must also be
engaged in the provisioning model. The business technology ideal would
be for technology to be self provisioned, with no IT department involve-
ment. In reality, IT does have a valuable role, and will act more like the
accounting department, as integral to the business function and not a “ser-
vice department” only. For sake of future stability, integration, security and
so forth, the IT department will need to stay involved in a broker/support
role. This is exactly how cloud makes a difference: making it easier and
more transparent to provision new technology. Many cloud services are
well described on an open market where any user can evaluate their rela-
tive function and cost instantly.
• Extreme Flexibility. In a commercial business, reducing time-to-market and
capitalizing quickly on opportunities is essential. In government, a quick
show of success is important in a political cycle. When you’re working for
a non-proft organization, quick response to what’s in the news makes a
difference in visibility, fundraising and the execution of your mission. It’s
the holy grail of IT: be more adaptive to change. More precisely, the chal-
lenge is to stay adaptive to change over time, even after weathering many
previous changes. A quagmire of prior quick fxes usually prevents any
future quick changes. Big up-front investments or “sunk costs” tend to
paralyze and prevent you from moving away from prior choices. High
switching costs lock you up. Yet if we want technology and business to
operate as one, something needs to give. Cloud helps by making it easier
to move in and out of technology solutions, but there remains a major chal-
lenge for any CIO who must enforce some structure and map some archi-
tecture onto it so that the agility of today doesn’t become the limitation of
tomorrow.
The “old” IT as a corporate conscience
Business doesn’t care about architecture. They should, but they don’t. Short-
term gain almost always wins over long-term considerations, especially if the
short-term opportunity is revenue and the long-term consideration is (per-
49
3 Business Innovation Through Cloud Computing
ceived as) a technology issue. A quick and dirty solution doesn’t sound so bad
if we can earn some extra money, right?
Traditionally the CIO, responsible for enterprise (IT) architecture, was the
only one who worried about reducing complexity and trying to limit the num-
ber of variations in order to remain agile and responsive. Now business is
assuming a more proactive role with regard to technology provisioning, so
part of this responsibility falls to them, too. You can self-provision whatever
you want, but you will have to bear the consequences if it doesn’t integrate
well or proves to be very resistant to change.
The role of an enterprise architecture practice should be exactly that: not just
guiding technology but guiding the organization as a whole. To ensure secu-
rity, integration and even cost control in a more distributed, fragmented world,
the importance of enterprise architecture will increase. This should be
founded on a principle-based architecture guiding the decision-making pro-
cess, and not a traditional blue-prints based plan that everybody needs to
follow. The architecture principles should be light and easy to digest, yet
robust enough to help to keep complexity down (and agility up). This is one
of the areas where the CIO needs to play a proactive role. Initiating the dis-
cussions within the organization that focus these issues in business terms:
what process or function has become a commodity, and what’s your business
case to NOT commoditize the technology part of it? Or, if you had to give up
one piece of technology in your organization, what would it be?
What this all means to the IT department
Most IT departments today are not ready for the agility and business involve-
ment that is required in a true business technology company. To grow in this
direction, cloud will inject some agility in the technology provisioning and
cost models, but other aspects will need to be addressed separately:
Educate business executives on the basics of IT that are needed to become •
technologically knowledgeable business people. In the “old” days, anyone
in the business needed to know at least the basics of fnance, marketing
and HR. Today, we add technology to that list. Check any current MBA cur-
riculum if you are still in doubt of what skills the future business leaders
will be bringing. On the IT side, this means it is necessary to adopt a way
of talking about technology that is more understandable to business.
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Seize the Cloud
Align the speed of change in IT to the speed of change on the business •
side. Processes and people in IT need to match whatever else is going on.
Employ process optimization within IT, applying Lean, CMM (Capability
Maturity Model) or ITIL (IT Infrastructure Management Library), which
are important levers to be able to speed up the business instead of slowing
it down.
Before creating a cloud strategy, you will need to understand your business •
strategy frst, and then determine the role technology must play in your
organization. The cloud strategy will then be much less about platforms or
technical decisions and much more linked to the innovation of business
processes and, for example, your business process outsourcing (BPO)
strategy.
It is important to note that although the scope and relevance of technology
has increased, this does not automatically imply a larger role for the tradi-
tional IT department. Delegation, shared responsibility with the business and
automation will more likely shrink the IT department. On the other hand,
rogue IT—IT that is outside the control of the IT department—is still not
desirable. When an organization continues to have a lot of rogue IT, it could
be a symptom of an IT department that is perceived as unresponsive, inca-
pable or infexible. Not exactly the intimacy and collaboration you would
expect in a business technology company. In fact, Forrester Research men-
tions a good organizational collaborative culture as one of the success factors
for business technology (Cameron 2009).
3.5
Conclusion
We truly live in a digital age, with digital natives and digital products and ser-
vices. It’s no wonder that technology is embedded in everything organizations
do. As we realize how prevalent technology is, we see that every technological
innovation can create many new paths for organizations to grow and improve.
Cloud computing is one of these innovations, and one that will have far-reach-
ing effects on how organizations operate and how they are structured. If you
want to be in business, you have to understand fnance, management and
strategy. We all know that. But if you want to stay in business you have to
really understand technology. The future of organizations will be determined
by the presence of tech-savvy business executives who bridge the cognitive
gap between IT and business, and who constantly drive technology-enabled,
meaningful business innovation.
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3 Business Innovation Through Cloud Computing
To make this more concrete, we can examine the fnancial model of IT and
the changes that cloud computing is bringing. This we will do in the next
chapter, where the economics of IT will be explained, and the different roles
and payment types that are associated with them.
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Cloud Computing Reshaping
Early Stage Venture Capital Investing
Smaller Investment Requirements
Yield “More Shots on Goal”
One of the unanticipated ways cloud computing is impacting the technology
world is this: It’s completely rewriting the rules of early-stage venture capital
investing.
From driving down the costs of building a company to enabling massive scal-
ability out of the gate, the cloud has resulted in venture frms seeing deals requir-
ing smaller capital requirements, but more of them. That cloud computing is a big
draw for venture investors should come as no surprise, as it enables young com-
panies to greatly reduce the time it takes to get their products to market.
“I just have to get in my car and drive up on the freeway and I’m going 80 mph
right away,” says Scott Orn, a principal at Silicon Valley venture frm Lighthouse
Capital. “It’s amazing.”
It’s a win/win scenario: young cloud companies needing less money to fund their
initial pushes can reduce the amount of control and ownership they have to give
up, and venture fund managers looking to make the most of their investment
dollars in a tough economy get to take “more shots on goal,” as Orn puts it.
Cloud’s Impact Trickling Down, Aﬀecting Investment Decisions
Orn, whose investment portfolio includes young cloud-related companies trying
to break into both the corporate computing and consumer applications markets,
says the smaller early-stage investment needs are having a trickle-down effect.
“The reduction in infrastructure costs and risk can ripple through the ecosystem
and open up early stage investing for a whole new class of investors,” he says. Orn
points out that so-called “super-angels,” or private investors who make larger,
later investments than traditional seed angels, are now able to fund deals that
previously would have required venture capital backing.
Meanwhile, Orn says the mere presence of cloud computing is altering invest-
ment decisions, as venture investors are more interested in companies that are
leveraging cloud computing rather than getting bogged down in establishing their
own IT operations. So, if a venture capitalist was faced with two companies offer-
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Case Lighthouse Capital
ing equally great services, but one was using Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud or
some other mature cloud offering to meet its peak computing needs while the
other was building its own data center, Orn insists the decision would be simple.
“You’d run away from the second company,” he says. “It’s table stakes; it’s like
coming to the table without an ante. That’s how much people trust Amazon.”
VCs Want Companies That Leverage the Cloud Rather Than Power It
That growing trust in cloud computing is a huge development. By encouraging
the young companies of today to take advantage of the cloud, the venture com-
munity is, in effect, acting as a cloud advocate and ensuring its growth.
Ironically, though, venture investors are much more skittish when it comes to
startups looking to actually become cloud providers. Startups looking to establish
themselves as fully integrated cloud solutions face stiff competition from the big,
established IT vendors, Orn says. And even those companies that address a cloud
niche still often face too many questions about their future. “I wish we had more
cloud companies to invest in,” he says. “But they’re very early in their lifecycles
right now, and they haven’t quite matured to the level we’re playing at.”
Any cloud provider startup hoping to secure venture funding should be focused
on doing one thing very well, Orn says. If such a company can demonstrate that
it has a disruptive technology that has the potential to defne a new market, ven-
ture investors become much more interested. For instance, one of Orn’s portfolio
companies, Delphix, specializes in the largely untapped area of database virtu-
alization.
But with the cloud provider market increasingly crowded, such companies are
few and far between. Conversely, entrepreneurs are creating myriad innovative
new services that leverage the cloud’s low-cost, ready-made IT infrastructure. It’s
an exciting new startup business model for a venture capital industry in search
of lower risk and faster returns.
“Instead of funding infrastructure costs, [venture investors] are actually funding
real apps and business services,” says Orn.
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4
Cloud Economics
4.1
Introduction
“Just follow the money.” This was the advice of the secret source Deep Throat
to reporter Bob Woodward in the movie All the President’s Men. Following the
money can be a way to reveal the complex relations and interactions between
different parties, which in the case depicted in the movie lead to the uncover-
ing of the Watergate scandal. In this particular chapter we will also follow the
money and bring light to the relations and interactions around cloud. We will
demonstrate that cloud computing will have a signifcant effect on the busi-
ness model of all economic agents in the IT market. The pressure to change
is caused mainly by the shift from assets to services and the change from a
license model to a subscription model. The resulting emergence of a more
transparent marketplace for IT services is also a factor.
As we will discuss in this chapter the effect of cloud will be felt throughout
the industry, by all parties: hardware providers, software providers, service
providers as well as internal IT departments. Cloud computing has increased
the number of ways these agents can collaborate, interact and charge for IT.
In this chapter, we will start to discuss the major shifts cloud computing is
bringing. Then we will cover the effect these shifts have on the fow of money
and goods between economic agents in the IT-market. Finally we will describe
what is changing for each of these economic agents.
4.2
The Overall Impact of Cloud Computing
Cloud computing has a signifcant impact on the way hardware, software and
services are produced, distributed and consumed. These changes will be dis-
cussed below.
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From assets to services
Traditionally hardware and software have been produced, distributed and
consumed as assets. Making use of such assets required an (often large)
upfront capital investment by the consumer. In the cloud era, services become
available that could be consumed on a pay-as-you-go basis. Capital invest-
ments in assets are absorbed by the provider and billed to the consumer on
the basis of real usage. From the consumer’s perspective, capital expenditure
to acquire or develop assets is replaced by operating expenses associated with
the use of services. The fip side of the coin is of course that the required
capital expenditure shifts from the consumer to the provider.
From buying or leasing hardware to infrastructure as a service
Traditionally hardware has been bought or leased by organizations. Purchas-
ing equipment is an investment that has a negative impact on the cash fow.
Hardware is carried on the balance sheet as a long-term capital asset. Main-
tenance and depreciation costs are part of the income statement.
In the case of leased hardware, the investment is not taken upfront but as an
operating expense. However, because a certain period for leasing has to be
contractually agreed upfront, the implications remain the same as in the pur-
chase scenario.
In the cloud era, hardware is no longer bought or leased but instead used as
a service to which one can subscribe. The price paid depends on the number
of times the service is actually provided. Because no upfront investment is
necessary to make use of the service, hardware is no longer carried on the
balance sheet and no depreciation is required (Schadler 2008). All costs
become part of the income statement. Payments are simply made when the
service is provided.
From a license model to a subscription model for software
Software is treated exactly the same as hardware in the cloud era. Software
is also something one can subscribe to and use as a service. The difference
with hardware is the way software is acquired traditionally. Software can
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4 Cloud Economics
either be custom-built or bought based on licenses. A license grants a right to
one party to use material owned by the other party, and the material in this
case is software. Often the license is limited to a number of users and/or a
time period. One needs to pay a fee for the license, which is a capital expen-
diture. When software is custom-built one normally needs to pay for the total
development investment upfront, which would also be a capital expendi-
ture.
While the license model is already quite attractive for providers, the subscrip-
tion model is even more so. With the subscription model, the costs a user
would incur for switching to an alternative service can quickly become pro-
hibitive, creating an effective lock-in. In that way, the service provider not only
gets a recurring fee but one that is likely to continue for a long time.
The rise of a big transparent marketplace
As a consequence of the shift from assets to services, a more transparent and
liquid marketplace is emerging. It is transparent in the sense that consumers
are able to compare services and prices of different vendors. It is a liquid
marketplace because the total trading capacity (of all services) is more scal-
able and thus provides ways to utilize that capacity better. Sharing capacity
drives up effciency of asset usage among cloud providers in the system and
so drives down cost for all. A more transparent and liquid marketplace at the
end will mean benefts for the users of this marketplace (the cloud consum-
ers) in terms of fnding the right service at a competitive price.
Usage-based pricing will drive the need to explicitly value
IT services
Gartner’s model for IT cost allocation (shown in Figure 4.1) suggests an evo-
lution of IT chargeback from simple cost-allocation schemes to negotiated
pricing to market-based pricing. Another level of evolution will see charge-
back, which once only operated at the lower layers of IT (like storage, servers
and bandwidth), moving into higher layers and using composite metrics that
include all layers of the service, including the application (for example the
“pay per click” on SAP transactions).
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Seize the Cloud
Figure 4.1: Hierarchy for cost-allocation evolution
To some extent, the evolution towards the top of the pyramid will be driven
by the desire of business to benchmark their internal IT relative to external
service providers. Already today business executives can easily determine the
cost of a transaction, the cost of an application service, or the cost of a gigabyte
of storage through public cloud services. This market comparison will force
IT to justify any price differences between the services they provide and
comparable services that are publicly available. IT departments need to work
hard to explain why the overall price for, say, a Windows server is 50% less per
hour on Amazon Web Services than what internal IT costs. Internal “private”
clouds will be particularly scrutinized by this continuous benchmarking
against similar offerings from the public space. This will force private cloud
providers to justify and quantify their added value in terms of security, com-
pliance, service levels and support in comparison to the public marketplace.
The diﬀerence between build and run diminishes
Traditionally about 80% of the IT budget is consumed by running costs: costs
to operate and maintain the current systems. This is the domain of IT, where
Governance
Challenge of
External Market
Comparison
Challenge of
Choice
Challenge of
Fairness
Challenge of
Accountability
Service Contracting
Operational
Service Levels
Service-Level
Objectives
Soorcc. Gorrocr, 1ooc 2010
Run
IT like
a Business
IT Pricing
Market-Based
Pricing
IT Service Portfolio
Pricing

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4 Cloud Economics
business has little infuence. IT normally charges these costs to the business
on a lump sum basis, which is one of the reasons why the business perceives
these costs as overhead.
The remaining 20% is spent on projects where new applications are built or
package solutions are customized. Normally the business controls the build-
costs and handles these as investments.
In the cloud era this will change. Software is used as a service, and once
implemented, these services and the associated costs can be directly linked
to the business users who asked for them. Depending on the number of busi-
ness users or the number of transactions, for example, these business users
can be charged directly for the use of the software. The costs for migration
and implementation can be included in the usage price of a service. In this
case all costs can be controlled by the business and the distinction between
building and running costs becomes obscured.
4.3
The Impact of Cloud on the Flow of Goods and Money
The traditional ﬂows
The traditional fow of IT services and money is shown in Figure 4.2. The
business user requests services that are delivered by a provider (in most
cases, the internal IT department) and pays a lump sum cost for these ser-
vices.
Internal IT contracts different providers and pays them for the software,
hardware and services. These providers are paid based on time, material or
licenses.
How cloud impacts the ﬂows
Figure 4.3 shows all the different ways cloud can impact the fow of services
and money. The dark boxes and arrows indicate the changes.
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Business User
Provider Internal IT provider
Services
Services
Hardware
Software
Per Time/Material
Per License
Per Lump Sum
Service providers
Hardware providers
Software providers

Provider
Business User
Provider
Internal IT provider
Service providers
Hardware providers
Software providers
Cloud providers
Broker Internal IT service broker
Managed services
Services
Services
Hardware
Software
Per Time/Material
Per Service
Per License
Per Service
Per Service
Service providers
Hardware providers
Software providers
Cloud providers

Provider
Figure 4.2: Traditional fow of services and money
Figure 4.3: Flow of services and money in the cloud era
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4 Cloud Economics
The main changes depicted in Figure 4.3 are:
A cloud type of provider emerges. This is a new type of service provider •
that offers cloud-based services (which could be anything provided as a
service) and is paid for the actual use of these services.
A broker role emerges. Cloud computing offers more and different oppor- •
tunities to acquire services. The number of providers will increase as will
the different characteristics of these services (for example, the application
programming interfaces). These different kind of services have to be
offered to business users in a coherent and integrated way. That is where
a broker function is required. This role is sometimes also referred to as the
demand function of IT. Chapter 5 will elaborate on this subject.
Business users will get managed services instead of a whole bunch of loose •
services. A managed service is a service that is delivered from a service
catalogue and integrates different lower-level services into something that
adds value for the business user.
Business users are charged by the broker per service instead of in a lump •
sum. Business users will see a more direct relationship between what they
consume and what they pay.
The broker is charged per service instead of per time, per material or per •
license.
Internal IT as a provider is no longer the single point of contact for its •
business users. That role is taken over by the broker function. Internal IT,
on the supply side, has become a supplier that has to compete with exter-
nal providers. Internal IT has to deliver services and charge for the con-
sumption of these services. One of the options for internal IT is to trans-
form into a private cloud provider, delivering cloud services that are so
critical for the organization that they cannot be outsourced.
A whole ecosystem of providers will emerge within an organizational con- •
text. For example, a SaaS provider is buying software and hardware from
different providers to be able to offer a SaaS solution via a broker to busi-
ness users. Different ways of acquiring goods and services will exist next
to one another, resulting in different ways these goods and services will be
charged.
Overall, the cloud will increase the number of options for how to deploy and
charge for IT. In order to hide this increasing complexity for business users,
the broker function will become more and more important. Chapter 5 will
discuss the new IT constitution in more depth.
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4.4
The Impact of Cloud on Different Types of Providers
and Consumers
In the whole stack of producers and consumers of IT services, the following
parties can be identifed:
Business users who consume services. •
Internal IT department, which produces and consumes services. •
Incumbent service providers who sell consultancy, technology and/or out- •
sourcing services.
Software providers who create software which is sold based on licenses. •
Hardware providers who sell computer equipment. •
Cloud providers who sell cloud services. •
How does cloud computing affect the way these different parties produce and
consume hardware, software and services?
Business users are in the driver’s seat
With the increasing competition between service providers offering different
kinds of services under different conditions and prices, the business users
have the golden opportunity to reap potential benefts like more agility, more
fexibility, cost savings and an improved time-to-market.
David Linthicum, a well-known cloud computing and SOA expert, wrote a blog about
the real value of cloud computing, which is right on the money. He identiﬁes three
core values: self improvement, agility and time to operations.
“Now that cloud computing is in the mega-hype stage there are continuous attempts
to deﬁne the true value of cloud computing for enterprises and government. Most of
the time we talk about capital expenses versus operating expenses, and sometimes
the concept of agility, including the elastic nature of cloud computing. So how should
you evaluate the value of cloud computing in the context of your enterprise? The truth
of the matter is, there are no hard and fast formulas we can leverage to compute the
exact dollar beneﬁt of any new type of technology application, including cloud com-
puting. However, there are many aspects of this new model to consider to help deter-
mine the real value of cloud computing:
Self improvement is the value of taking a new look at your existing IT solutions.
One of the things that cloud computing forces you to do is to examine your existing
IT architecture and determine what works and what does not. Then, create a plan to
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4 Cloud Economics
improve upon it as you relocate aspects of the existing architecture to the cloud. The
value here is an improvement on the existing way things are done as you move from
platform to platform. This value will be apparent no matter if you move to a cloud
platform or not. We’ll see many who brag about how the new cloud computing deploy-
ment is such a success and a cost saver, when the core value is really around the
improvement in the architecture and not the movement into the cloud. However, I’ll
still count this as a true value of moving to the cloud.
Agility is the ability to change your IT solutions to better react to the needs of the
business. The value of agility is nothing new; the degree of value will vary greatly
from enterprise to enterprise. Cloud computing provides you with the ability to adjust
solutions as the business or mission changes, allowing IT to scale up or down, and to
do so in almost direct proportion to costs. Moreover, you can more quickly adjust by
leveraging the cloud considering that purchasing hardware and software, as well as
integration, has been factored out of the equation.
Time to operations is the ability to quickly get something up and running to meet
the needs of the business. Related to agility, but not exactly the same, time to oper-
ations is the ability for IT to determine on Monday that we need additional storage
to support a particular application, and they will have that storage system up and
running in the cloud on Tuesday. Or, the ability to leverage Google App Engine to build
an application to meet a business need, without having to wait for the hardware and
software to be delivered and installed.
Finally, it’s the ability to leverage a SaaS player, such as Salesforce.com or others,
rather than go through the pain and expense of implementing an on-premise enter-
prise software package, most of which are famous for taking more time and money
than originally expected. Notice that I’ve yet to mention capital expenses or opera-
tional expenses, which are innate to the values described above. I assume that you
focus on self improvement, agility, and time to operations as the core value of cloud
computing. You’ll ﬁnd that these factors serve you better in making a business case
for cloud computing. They are the true values of the cloud.” (Linthicum 2010)
If done correctly, cloud computing will certainly generate benefts for the
business users. This requires a well-balanced approach between the business
user who will drive the change and the internal IT department who will act
as the guide. The trap for the business users is that they want to order cloud
services themselves. Cloud can be so appealing and easy at frst glance that
they might think they do not need the internal IT department anymore. The
result is that the business user will end up in a mess: a bunch of services that
are not integrated but cannot easily be discarded will cause the business to
be locked into ineffcient provisioning. In the end, the expected benefts are
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nullifed. Like any other investment, the cloud can generate benefts but it
also has its costs.
When creating a business case for cloud computing, the benefts and costs
shown in Table 4.1 should be taken into consideration.
Potential benefts of cloud computing Potential costs of cloud computing
Improved agility: IT solutions respond
faster to changing business needs
Migration costs: costs to migrate a current
solution to a cloud service
Improved time-to-operations: ready to
quickly get something up and running
to meet new business needs
Switching costs: costs to switch from the
chosen provider to another provider
Cost reduction: decrease in all types
of costs associated with building and
running internal IT
Integration costs: costs to make the cloud
services work together with current busi-
ness processes, applications, and infrastruc-
ture
Risk reduction: decrease in risks of
running internal IT, such as business
continuity
Implementation costs: costs to prepare
employees for the change, embed the
change and educate employees
Increased revenue: improved sales result-
ing from entering new markets or using
new business models
Costs of increased risks: what are the costs
associated with increased risks, such as
data security?
Table 4.1: Benefts and costs of cloud computing

Booz, Allen, Hamilton has conducted an economic analysis to investigate the potential
savings of cloud computing for the US government. They concluded that, over a
13-year life cycle, the total cost of implementing and sustaining a cloud environment
may be as much as two-thirds lower than maintaining a traditional, non-virtualized
IT data centre. It should be noted that this requires a transition and implementation
that will take several years (Alford and Morton 2010).
In any case, the business user is expected to drive the change: fnd business
opportunities, engage the internal IT department and expect them to act as
a business in providing services from a service catalogue, just like cloud
providers.
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4 Cloud Economics
Internal IT department as the broker
As stated before, the internal IT department will increasingly be compared
with external service providers like the cloud providers who sell hardware
and software as a service priced per use. This is a threat for most internal IT
departments, because they are often not yet able to offer services. And even
when they are offering comparable services, they are not able to match the
pricepoint of external providers. So the internal IT department is under
pressure.
On the other hand, the internal IT department has a much deeper under-
standing of its business users, of the IT market and the organization’s hard-
ware and software landscape than external providers. In addition, somebody
in the organization has to look after integration, safeguard the corporate risks
and try to achieve purchasing synergies.
The internal IT department is in the best position to deal with these threats
and opportunities, and to buy, integrate and orchestrate services. The internal
IT department effectively becomes an intermediary between the internal
customer and all internal and external service providers.
As well as performing a broker function, most large internal IT departments
will use cloud technology to provide their internal customers with private
cloud services. The challenge for IT is to develop the right mix of internal and
external capabilities in order to become a best-in-class service provider for
their internal customers.
Incumbent service providers can build on customer relationships
These providers traditionally have strong relationships with their clients.
They can build on these relationships to help their customers implement
cloud services. On the other hand, they can consume cloud services them-
selves and integrate these in their service offerings (for example, for develop-
ment and testing). They can even act as a cloud broker between their custom-
ers and cloud providers. They know their clients and the IT market very well
and, due to their large scale, are able to buy cloud services for the best price
and resell or package these services to their clients. They can also offer man-
aged access to different kinds of cloud services. This might be attractive for
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these clients who have neither the scale nor the capability to explore the IT
market.
Because of cloud computing, service providers taking on the role of producer
can now provide a larger set of services to their clients and gain a bigger share
of the total expenditure by these clients. Of course they will meet with some
pressure due to their business model, because these services will be delivered
on a subscription basis instead of an hourly fee basis.
Incumbent service providers invest in cloud computing because they face a
growing demand from their clients for help in adopting cloud computing and
rolling it out across their organizations. Typical services they develop are
cloud adoption roadmaps and cloud maturity models.
IBM, for example, developed a whole range of services based on the idea of a
hybrid cloud, extending the enterprise perimeter to the cloud (Boulton 2010).
Software providers have to rethink their business model
This is the area where a lot is happening. Traditional software providers are
under extreme pressure to rethink their business model. The existing license
model is rapidly being replaced by a subscription model. Another challenge
for the traditional software providers is to change the level of granularity of
their services. Their current software has often a very low level of granularity,
too low to determine the match between the needed functionality for a given
business process and the services. Most ERP-systems are still monolithic and
far from being service-oriented.
The main ERP vendors SAP and Oracle, who sell their software through
licenses, face strong competition from new players like Salesforce in the CRM
area. Salesforce is providing CRM as a service via the subscription model.
Similar competition takes place in the market for generic applications like
email and offce software. Microsoft, relying on the license model, was and
still is the dominant player in this market but is now facing competition from
Google, who uses the subscription model. Google is now able to offer an email
solution in the cloud for a fxed and relative low cost per user. Microsoft, real-
izing it has a lot to lose, has concluded that they must be able to offer their
software via the subscription model, too. They now invest heavily in cloud.
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4 Cloud Economics
About 70% of their 40,000 developers are working on cloud developments
either directly or indirectly. As Steve Balmer said: “for the cloud, we’re all in.”
(Dubie 2010).
Hardware providers face a shift in demand
Traditionally, hardware is bought or leased by the internal IT department. In
the cloud era hardware is either sold as a service or incorporated into other
services, just like software.
Hardware providers like HP, IBM and Dell face competition from Amazon who
offers infrastructure as a service through the cloud. In response the tradi-
tional market leaders will have to fnd ways to do exactly the same.
The fact that software is provided as a service implies that hardware provid-
ers will see an increased demand from cloud service providers. Microsoft,
Google, Amazon, IBM and the like are buying a lot of hardware to build huge
data centers to provide cloud services around the world. The internal IT
department, on the contrary, will buy less hardware.
It is still unclear whether cloud computing will reduce the total capacity of
computer hardware required worldwide. It is expected that cloud computing
will increase the average utilization level dramatically. On the other hand, the
availability of clouds will drive new ways of using computer capacity, such as
for analytics, which could offset the gains from effciency.
Cloud providers set the pace
Companies like Amazon Web Services, Google and Salesforce are already
providing cloud services on a pay-per-use fee—sometimes even for free.
Amazon Web Services (AWS) offers a highly standardized commodity plat-
form via a subscription model. AWS was one of the frst real cloud providers.
The story goes that Amazon introduced their Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2)
because they developed a highly available and scalable infrastructure for
their retail business that was only in demand during the Christmas season,
not for the rest of the year. By re-using this spare capacity for other purposes,
Amazon was building on the same core capabilities they had to develop for
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their retail business. On the other hand, it was largely by coincidence that
Amazon jumped into the cloud business. One of their lead developers, Chris
Pinkham, got homesick and wanted to go back to his home in South Africa.
Because Amazon didn’t want him to leave the company, they gave him the
freedom to innovate. As a result, EC2 was born in 2006 (Higginbotham 2010).
Cloud computing is just another business model for Amazon, but it is a fast-
growing one. It is estimated that cloud services could generate about $650
million in sales for AWS in 2010.
Google is offering cloud services like Gmail, Google Apps and Picasa. These
are geared to consumers and small- and medium-sized enterprises. Most of
their services are free, at least for consumers. Because Google is able to attract
a lot of people to their services they can attract a lot of advertisements. These
advertisements are their main revenue stream. Google is also active in the
market for large enterprises with cloud services like Google Apps (Brad-
shaw 2010).
Companies like Amazon, Google and Salesforce defnitely set the pace. They
are closely watched by all other service providers.
And new providers are entering the market by offering cloud services specifc
to certain communities, like government. In Chapter 8, we will discuss the role
of government in the context of cloud computing and data.
4.5
Conclusion
The bottom line of this chapter is that cloud computing has a signifcant
impact on IT economics. The way IT services are produced, distributed, con-
sumed and charged will change dramatically. The subscription model where
hardware and software is sold as a service is quite different from traditional
models where licenses, hours and hardware components were sold. This again
has an impact on the way the business users are charged by IT. Billing becomes
much more transparent. The business gets insight into what it is paying for.
This infuences their buying behavior, and certainly has a positive infuence
on the business-IT relationship. At the end of the day, the overall benefts to
business might be considerable!
For the IT parties involved, the question remains who will be ready to ben-
eft and who will have a hard time to adjust. The internal IT department will
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4 Cloud Economics
face strong competition from cloud providers and has to rethink its role, most
likely changing from a supplier of services to a broker of services. The incum-
bent service providers have a different opportunity: to help their customers
with cloud computing. On the other hand the self service aspect of cloud
computing will put some pressure on the demand for these providers. The
software providers are under the largest pressure. They face strong competi-
tion from the cloud providers and are rethinking not just their pricing, but
their entire business model. Some of these software providers will start to
offer their solutions as a service, others may being too reluctant or slow to
adapt and could lose marketshare dramatically. Finally hardware providers
will see a change in their client base. Instead of the internal IT departments,
providers of cloud services will become their prime customers, probably ask-
ing for different products that better ft the cloud datacenters.
In the next chapter we will discuss in more depth the changing role for the
internal IT department.
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Seize the Cloud
Dutch Government Familiarizing Itself
With All of Its Cloud Options
Clear Benefts of Cloud Don’t Obscure
Need to Do Homework
On its surface, cloud computing is a no-brainer. It’s a model for delivering corpo-
rate technology in a way that contains costs, reduces the environmental footprint
of data centers, and makes powerful business applications readily available on
an anytime, anywhere basis. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t signifcant con-
siderations, such as security and privacy, that an organization should take into
account when looking to transition to the cloud.
This is why the government of The Netherlands is being careful to perform due
diligence before proceeding with plans to introduce cloud computing into its
environment. ICTU, the Dutch agency that oversees the implementation of infor-
mation and communications technologies, is currently investigating cloud com-
puting, and determining its potential role in delivering E-government.
Since early 2010, ICTU has been turning over every rock—from researching ven-
dors to analyzing legal risks—in an effort to fully understand what its cloud com-
puting options are, get a handle on the associated costs, set realistic expectations,
and make sure that the potential business implications of moving into the cloud
are perfectly clear. The effort, says ICTU advisor Paul Suijkerbuijk, has been
spurred by two things: the desire to lower data center costs, and a steady stream
of suggestions from vendors that it’s time for the Dutch government to consider
cloud computing.
Cloud Dovetails Nicely With Dutch Government’s Goals
The cloud also has become a more interesting option because of ICTU’s efforts
on another front: It’s rebuilding the Dutch government’s main web site, which will
make it easier for citizenry to log in and access personal information, as well as
more general information about nationwide services. And it’s approaching the
site modularly, developing building blocks—such as storage and search—that can
easily be combined in an interoperable cloud environment. A cloud-enabled
E-government site would simplify the delivery of a wide range of applications
available as subscription-based services, thus reducing ICTU’s development
workload.
71
Case ICTU
That’s not all. Suijkerbuijk says that in the future the cloud also could be used to
deliver business applications to civil servants, as well as to run some of the pri-
mary business process environments on which governmental departments rely.
The cloud strategy, once adopted, is likely to start with the E-government initia-
tive, then move on to civil servant computing resources before tackling the more
unwieldy business process environments. “The bigger the system you have to
move into the cloud, the more diffcult it is,” he says.
Establishing a greener IT operation that minimizes power and cooling needs also
is a factor, although Suijkerbuijk says that it’s proving diffcult to quantify the real
gains organizations realize in this area as they move from traditional hosting
models to the cloud.
European Privacy Protections Always Lurking
But all of these things take a back seat initially to another consideration: Unlike
organizations in America that have been moving full-steam-ahead on cloud
deployments, ICTU and other European entities exploring the cloud face a unique
set of privacy-related challenges.
“In the U.S., it’s easier to put something in the cloud,” says Suijkerbuijk. “American
companies are hosting these clouds, and it’s quite obvious that data stored in the
cloud is also in America. These same companies are offering their services in
Europe, storing data in the U.S, and we’re not allowed to store governmental or
personal data in foreign countries.”
As a result, ICTU is exploring the possibility of spearheading government-wide
cloud efforts that would store data within the boundaries of The Netherlands,
enabling it to make something like Google Docs available to Dutch government
workers. If that proves impossible, there’s a chance ICTU could fnd itself devel-
oping a similar type of productivity application suite itself, as there is no Dutch
equivalent to Google Docs.
The idea of a government-wide cloud, or of an ICTU-built version of Google Docs,
speaks directly to what Suijkerbuijk believes is one of the greatest opportunities
to put the cloud into action in The Netherlands: namely, working together. Many
Dutch governmental entities, including 400 cities, are investigating cloud comput-
ing, and while none are obliged to be part of a standardized government cloud, a
joint effort would help everyone, Suijkerbuijk says.
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Seize the Cloud
Innovation Centre to Encourage Focus on Cloud Applications
In lieu of that cooperation, Suijkerbuijk has some advice for other Dutch organi-
zations trying to justify cloud investments. He suggests that instead of focusing
on the anticipated cost savings and environmental improvements, they should
look at the expected impact on application development and functionality, which
could be even more dramatic. This also speaks more to the inevitability of the
cloud; it’s not so much a matter of whether the Dutch government will move into
the cloud, but rather how far.
That inevitability is why Suijkerbuijk’s focus has been on heading up develop-
ment of a cloud computing innovation centre that’s expected to be operational by
the end of 2010. The center will serve as a cloud testing environment where Dutch
agencies can try out applications and get help with their frst steps into the
cloud.
Once the innovation centre is open, says Suijkerbuijk, “We will start developing
building blocks and offer cloud services as soon as possible.”
73
Case Peracton
When Building Cloud Applications, Target
Market’s Limitations Must Be Considered
Investment-Matching Service Provides Template
for Complex Cloud Apps
Building applications that will reside in the cloud—particularly complex com-
mercial applications that will be sold to fnancial services companies—requires
some careful consideration. With questions lingering about the cloud’s readiness
to satisfy the fnancial services industry’s stringent requirements in the areas of
security, reliability and performance, it’s critical that software-as-a-service offer-
ings be built with these perceived limitations in mind.
That’s exactly how Laurentiu Vasiliu focused his team’s energy in building the
suite of services his startup company, Peracton Ltd., launched earlier this year.
Those services—based on algorithms Vasiliu and his team helped write while on
staff at the National University of Ireland Galway’s Digital Enterprise Research
Institute—are able to identify the mutual funds that best ft a customer’s invest-
ment profle in a matter of seconds.
The idea behind Peracton’s service is two-fold. It speeds up the process of deter-
mining the best investment vehicles for a fnancial customer, thus replacing a
manual process that has involved using Excel spreadsheets to categorize thou-
sands of mutual funds, each conforming to more than 20 investment parameters.
It also is designed to show, with mathematical precision, exactly why a particular
fund was chosen, an important consideration in a highly regulated industry.
As tricky as the application sounds, building it as a cloud service made things
even trickier. It had to work across vast geographies and networks as if it were
running on a server in the next room—something Vasiliu demonstrated in a demo
for customers on both coasts of the U.S. while he was in North Africa and the
software was running on servers in Ireland.
Application Tweaks Provide Valuable Lessons
Not surprisingly, Vasiliu has emerged from the experience of developing the ser-
vice with some pretty clear ideas of things software designers need to consider
when building cloud-based applications.
Peracton’s work to make the technology cloud-compliant started with the graphic
user interface. Vasiliu knew the tendency of developers is to build applications
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Seize the Cloud
that look great, but he decided his team should take a different approach, keep-
ing the interface basic so as not to have the network get bogged down trying to
serve up snazzy images and design elements. “If the graphic interface looks great
but is slow, what’s the point?” asks Vasiliu.
The next issue was confgurability, a crucial element of a service that would be
sold primarily as a “white label” component of a service integrator’s integrated
solution. Highly confgurable cloud applications can require that as much as
60 percent of the software be reworked in order to achieve desired confgurations.
Vasiliu wanted Peracton’s service to lower the burden on IT teams by ensuring
that re-confgurations only require reworking 5 percent to 10 percent of the core
software.
Then, of course, there was the matter of addressing the admittedly stringent
security requirements of a target market of institutional customers that may not
yet be confdent about exchanging sensitive fnancial data in the cloud. Vasiliu
and his team made sure their software was designed to work with the most pop-
ular and accepted security system protocols. But during the design, when it
became clear that the embedded security schemes for protecting transmitted data
might not meet the requirements of some institutions, the service was tweaked
to enable it to tap the most popular protocols for negotiating frewalls, as well.
App’s Market Message Intended to Reﬂect Industry’s Cloud Sentiments
Even with the interface, confgurability and security addressed, Vasiliu is well
aware that he’s still dealing with what is perhaps the most cloud-averse industry.
Despite fnancial services companies’ growing comfort with packaged integrator
offerings that feature white label services such as Peracton’s, Vasiliu still has
chosen to exercise caution when using the “cloud computing” terminology of
which fnancial services executives are so wary.
“Even though our software is in the cloud, I’m careful not to use the buzzwords,
and instead say we have a web-based application,” he says. In fact, Peracton’s
service is available in both cloud-based and on-premise versions.
For the short term, Vasiliu expects to have to dance around the topic of the cloud
while the industry continues getting accustomed to the idea of placing data-in-
tensive apps in the cloud. But he’s confdent that as developers grow savvier
about what fnancial services companies require from cloud services, and as
network capacity increases, the uncertainty Peracton encounters in the market
today will fall away. “In fve to seven years,” Vasiliu says, “the path to the cloud
will get clearer.”
75
5
The New IT Constitution
5.1
Introduction
The cloud offers a new way to consume and deliver IT resources, so it is
logical to ask what the impact of the cloud will be on the way IT is managed
and how it relates to the core business. In this chapter we will argue that a
“new IT constitution” is required for the enterprise to gain real benefts from
cloud computing. These benefts cannot be fully realized simply by imple-
menting a technical solution, such as a cloud management platform, or purely
by consuming services from an external provider through a public cloud.
Changes to IT governance, management capabilities and processes are need-
ed—hence, a new IT constitution. Some recent cloud implementation projects
have devoted up to 50 percent of the total effort to these issues. Enterprises
who have ignored the need for IT management and process changes, and
focused simply on the technical implementation of cloud, may fail to realize
net benefts.
Examples of cloud computing cases where it would have been better if changes in IT
management and processes had been included upfront:
Cloud service consumption
A line-of-business unit in an organization procures public cloud services without going
through the organization’s internal IT department. Costs are incurred with the public
provider. Unless there is a corresponding reduction in costs within the internal IT
department, the cloud procurement has resulted in increasing the total cost to the
organization.
Cloud service delivery
An internal IT department implements a cloud management platform on top of their
virtualized infrastructure, with the resource pool consisting of previously allocated
projects and services. When the business wants to add on a new service, they still
need to procure resources for the cloud pool in the traditional method: by signing a
purchase order, waiting for the vendor to deliver the physical equipment, and hoping
the IT department will rack it and stack it quickly, so that it can be used in the cloud.
In this scenario, not all the beneﬁts of cloud services are being realized, since the
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Seize the Cloud
processes to manage the capacity and the resource pool separately from the delivery
process have not been considered.
In this chapter we consider the main drivers for a new IT constitution. We
identify some critical new IT capabilities that the cloud will demand, and sug-
gest some tools to analyze current IT management capabilities and processes
to determine what needs to change.
5.2
Drivers for the New IT Constitution
Cloud enables “self-service” IT
The concept of “self service” is at the core of cloud computing. Just like the PC
did in the 1980s, the cloud, and especially the public cloud, enables depart-
ment-level business managers to procure their own IT systems. They can
declare independence from corporate IT with its long planning cycles, slow
response times and rationed resources. Across many enterprises, Line-of-
Business (LoB) departments are already procuring cloud services indepen-
dent from IT. The rise of Salesforce.com is a major example of this trend. In
2010 Gartner estimated that Salesforce.com had gained market share to hold
12,5 percent of the CRM market, placing it third in the list of CRM vendors
after SAP and Oracle (Shread 2010).
While many business executives may welcome this opportunity to break free
from the shackles of IT, there are real risks to the business. To continue the
analogy with the PC revolution, the explosion in “do it yourself” IT with man-
agers running the business on spreadsheets led to a massive explosion in
unmanaged data and a whole generation of new problems relating to security,
data integrity and auditing that still plague many organizations.
Cloud services pose similar risks, as well as some new ones, since the data is
now outside the enterprise frewall. For example, the marketing department
of a large consumer services company decided to use a third-party marketing
database for managing campaigns. Fairly soon the data in the third-party
database fell out of sync with the company’s master customer data, resulting
in incorrect mailings and reduced customer satisfaction.
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5 The New IT Constitution
But essentially the dynamic is the same: on the one hand, self-service IT
promises fexibility and responsiveness, while on the other hand, centralized
IT promises control and effciency.
Self service, of course, implies that the business users take responsibility for
aspects of IT that were previously handled by the IT department. Many busi-
ness users are probably not aware of the background administration tasks
that they may have unwittingly taken on by opting for a cloud service. Back-
ups and security patching are two obvious examples. As cloud evolves, it is
likely that these will be offered as “value added” services by the public cloud-
service providers, but IT leaders need to make sure their users understand
the risks and responsibilities of self-service computing.
Figure 5.1: The traditional IT dilemma
Innovation will come from outside the ﬁrewall
One of the great benefts of the Internet age is that enterprises enjoy much
greater access to market innovation. Successful and agile enterprises will
want to exploit innovative new technologies and solutions wherever they are
found, and embed them into their business processes. Cloud is a great enabler,
as it allows businesses to adopt new tools and processes much more rapidly
and fexibly than before. Gone is the dependency on IT departments to iden-
tify, plan and implement innovative new business tools, since they can now
be picked up in the global market. This calls into question traditional ways of
doing IT strategy that assume internal IT will be the main engine of business
process innovation.
External cloud services provide a lower entry cost and a relatively low-risk way
for businesses to experiment with new business concepts and IT solutions.
Self-service IT
Responsive
Flexible
Functionally optimized

Centrally managed IT
Secure
Auditable
Enterprise-optimized

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Seize the Cloud
Non-value-added functions are being relentlessly commoditized
As discussed in Chapter 4, chargeback and market-price comparison will
force IT departments to constantly justify the cost of their services. It is likely
that this will be increasingly hard for non-differentiating functions that have
been commoditized, such as email. The cloud offers a more liquid market for
such commodity services, which in turn will drive down costs. IT departments
will need to identify which business functions are core and differentiating, and
which ones are non-core and commodity. Then they can plan to exploit com-
modity cloud services wherever it makes sense, in order to drive down costs.
Service orientation comes of age
Many IT departments have been on an SOA journey for several years now.
Although some SOA programs have become mostly a software engineering
exercise, with a focus on SOA as a programming model, the promise of service
orientation to provide reusable, fexible, dynamic, loosely coupled components
to enable dynamic business processes remains real, and truly comes of age
with cloud and the concept of “anything-as-a-service.”
An essential characteristic of the cloud is that it formalizes a service contract
between service consumer and service provider. The abstraction of the cloud
service means that the consumer is isolated from decisions about how or
where the cloud service is delivered. The service contract specifes service
characteristics like availability, performance, security and functionality in
terms that can be understood by the business user.
This is in fact a generalization of the concept of service orientation. From
being merely about software modules and interfaces, services can now be
provided at any level of the stack: storage services up to software-as-a-
service.
It’s important here to distinguish between a business service and an IT ser-
vice. What businesses want to buy “as a service” is typically a business func-
tion, which is typically expressed in business terms such as “customer man-
agement.” This typically breaks down into a set of lower-level business
processes (enroll a customer, manage a sales campaign), which are suff-
ciently granular to be defned precisely enough to implement “as a service”
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5 The New IT Constitution
with SLAs, service contracts, etc. What IT provides in terms of a service cata-
logue is often a much lower-level set of IT functions (deploy a workstation,
enroll a user, deploy a server). Therefore, there must be service catalogues at
multiple levels, with around 20-30 offerings in the high-level business service
catalogue and several hundred in the detailed IT service catalogue.
We should also note that the concept of a service is key to Information Tech-
nology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) V3. We touch on the relationship between
ITIL and cloud services later in this chapter.
While the notion of “anything-as-a-service” embodies the principle of service
orientation at a theoretical level, there are many additional requirements for
cloud services to be truly “service oriented” as a SOA practitioner would
understand it. For example, there should be clear service protocols and stan-
dards to identify, instantiate, use and terminate a service, or clearly defned
use cases and service behaviors. Many cloud services today are not con-
structed with a standard and structured service interface. Cloud standards,
such as those being developed by the Distributed Management Task Force
(see DMTF in the References section of this book) and the Open Group Cloud
Work Group (see The Open Group in the References section of this book) will
become essential.
Integration remains the watchword
All of the above trends reinforce the need for IT to act as an integrator of
external and internally provided services. Rather than focus on the content
of these services, the role of IT is more to focus on the ability to assemble and
disassemble them into new business processes. We might use the term
“orchestrator” to defne this role. This requires several levels of integration.
At the infrastructure level, IT needs to provide key service management capa-
bilities to provision, monitor and secure these services regardless of where
they are delivered from. IT must provide integrated service delivery.
At the platform level, IT needs to integrate applications and data to ensure
consistency of data across multiple applications: both internal and in the
cloud. And fnally, at the business process level, there is a need to integrate
the business events and data managed by these applications in the context of
integrated business processes.
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Seize the Cloud
These integration disciplines are not new, and IT has been delivering tools
and approaches to achieving integration for many years. What cloud brings
is a new dimension: the need to integrate services, some of which may be
delivered by external service providers over whom IT has no control and
which are inherently dynamic. New tools are emerging that address these new
aspects of cloud integration, such as RightScale for cloud management (see
RightScale in the References section of this book) and IBM’s Cast Iron (Cast
Iron 2010) for application and data integration.
5.3
New IT Capabilities for the Cloud Era
The drivers discussed above will affect different IT departments in different
ways, and to different levels. We propose that there are three capabilities of
IT management that will assume increasing importance as IT transitions into
the cloud era.
What are these three capabilities?
IT as orchestrator of services
The concept of business technology (BT) introduces the idea that IT must
separate the functions of “IT business enablement” from “IT operational
excellence” (Cameron 2009). This separation allows IT to become a broker of
external services as well as one of the main providers of services to the busi-
ness. In essence, a new IT “supply chain” is established, as illustrated in Fig-
ure 5.2.
In this model, the broker function manages the service catalogue and works
with business to select appropriate IT services from the catalogue. It also has
the role of managing the business process aspects of orchestration—ensuring
that all the services knit together to support the business needs.
The internal provider function is responsible for the secure, safe, and effcient
delivery of internal IT services—whether delivered using traditional “siloed”
IT systems or based on private cloud technology. In addition, it works with the
broker function on orchestration, focusing on the service delivery, information
integrity, management and compliance aspects of managing multiple cloud
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5 The New IT Constitution
providers. These providers will operate at all levels—software, platform and
infrastructure as a service—and some may be suppliers to the internal IT
function.
Later in this chapter we discuss how existing service management frame-
works, such as ITIL, can be used to analyze the changes to the IT service
management processes that are required to allow this “orchestrator” role to
deliver integrated service management across internal and external service
providers.
IT as venture capitalist
An important aspect of the ‘business excellence’ role of IT is to manage the
portfolio of business services that are available within the service catalogue.
The model here is that of a “venture capitalist”—IT builds a complementary
and dynamic portfolio of services selected for their functional excellence,
innovation, service excellence and cost characteristics. Managing this portfo-
lio is a new IT capability that goes beyond traditional supplier management.
Business user
Internal
IT systems
Internal
IT provider
Service
catalogue
Broker
Cloud
service
providers
Orchestration
Figure 5.2: New IT supply chain
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Seize the Cloud
IT as app store provider
The massive success of the Apple iPhone and its “app store” model has led
many IT leaders to consider its applicability to enterprise IT services. Apple
even launched the “Mac App Store” with apps for their Mac computers (Weiss
2010). The UK government’s G-cloud program is a major exponent of this
approach (Espiner 2009). The G-cloud is intended to include an app store
where government and local government agencies can purchase software and
services from a variety of providers. They will be able to access software dem-
onstrations, work out implementation costs, and order software on an auto-
mated basis, both in standard commercial packages and bespoke software
applications. The app store will also include components such as a payment
object for money transfer, which could be embedded into multiple suites.
The app store model is particularly appealing to large, federated organizations
(such as governments) as a means of harmonizing software acquisition and
deployment across multiple user departments. It would be implemented from
a technical perspective using the service catalogue.
One approach to building an enterprise app store is to give the business free-
dom to provision their own tools, subject to guidelines, and after gaining some
experience, to standardize on one variation. For example, if everybody starts
to use a certain project-management tool in the cloud, then the enterprise can
negotiate a better deal with that provider. From then on, that becomes the
mandatory choice for their PM tools.
5.4
Mapping the New IT Capabilities for the Cloud
Given that these new capabilities are needed, delivering them will have a
signifcant impact on the IT management processes and organization. Enter-
prises need a map of IT capabilities that can help to identify what needs to
change or improve for the adoption of cloud services. Two such maps are For-
rester Research’s “IT Capability Map” (Scott 2010) and IBM’s “Component
Business Model” (Pohle et al. 2005). Both Forrester and IBM have developed
general business mapping tools that have been used to map the capabilities
of the IT function itself. In the next section we consider in more detail how to
use IBM’s Component Business Model to analyze the impact of the cloud on
IT processes and capabilities.
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5 The New IT Constitution
Using the Component Business Model to analyze the impact of
the cloud on IT processes and capabilities
This section describes the IBM Component Business Model for IT as a frame-
work for understanding which processes will be impacted by a cloud solu-
tion.
Cloud computing touches many sectors within an organization to a greater or
lesser extent. The impact of cloud-service consumption is very different from
the impact of cloud-service provision. Each and every organization is unique
in how it differentiates itself and adds value to the goods and services that
drive its revenue, and in the implementation of business processes that make
up command and control within the organization. Within whole industries,
many of the business processes have become standardized as best practices,
but the implementation of these processes in terms of policy, procedures and
standards remains truly unique. In order to assess which processes are
impacted by cloud services, and to what extent, we need a framework to map
the processes and represent the organization.
What is a component business model?
IBM uses component business models as a method for representing the entire busi-
ness in a simple framework that ﬁts on a single page. It is an evolution of traditional
views of a business, such as business unit, function, location or process. Using the
component business model, it is possible to identify the basic building blocks of the
business. Each building block includes the people, processes and technology needed by
this component to act as a standalone entity and deliver value to the organization.
The Component Business Map (CBM) shows activities across lines of business, without
the constrictions of locations, internal silos or business units. The Component Business
Map shows the entire company on a single page, making it extremely easy to visual-
ize the impact of a particular initiative: in this context, cloud computing.
As shown in Figure 5.3, the top row, “direct,” represents all of those components in
the business that set the overall strategy and direction for the organization. The
middle row, “control,” represents all of the components in the business that translate
those plans into actions, in addition to managing the day-to-day running of those
activities. The bottom row, “execute,” contains the business components that actually
execute the detailed activities and plans of the organization.
Each CBM is unique to each company: the columns are created after thorough anal-
ysis of a business’s functions and value chain, and the rows are deﬁned by actions.
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Seize the Cloud
However, the anchor point for each CBM is an industry model selected to represent
a close starting point for each organization. Figure 5.3 shows a sample CBM from
the retail industry. The columns represent the business process categories/groups.
The intersection of the rows and columns contains the processes.
Impact of cloud computing on the business of IT
To analyze the impact of cloud computing, we use the CBM for the “business
of IT”—which applies to service providers or internal IT organizations. Figure
5.4 shows the raw CBM for the “business of IT”.
Market Strategy
Merchandise
Planning
Channel Strategy Corporate Strategy
Corporate Planning
Financial Planning
Corporate
Governance
Budget
Performance Mgt
Treasury & Risk
Mgt
Legal & Regulatory
Compliance
Inventory Control
Financial Reporting
& Accounting
Indirect
Procurement
HR Administration
IT Systems
& Operations
Store Design
Network Design
Warehouse Design
Demand/Flow
Planning
Inbound Routing
Receipt Scheduling
Delivery Scheduling
Carrier Mgt
Warehouse Mgt
Transportation
Mgt
Fleet Mgt
Reverse Logistics
Real Estate Strategy
Internet Design
Catalog &
Call Center Design
Channel Mgt
Order Mgt
Order Mgt
Inventory Mgt
Merchandise Mgt
Price/Sign Mgt
Labor Mgt
Facilities Mgt
Channel Planning
Space Planning
Promotion Planning
Product Planning
Sourcing
Product Flow
Planogramming
Allocation
Inventory Mgt
Demand Forecast
Price Management
Content Mgt
Vendor Mgt
Item Mgt
Product Mgt
PO Mgt
Vendor Mgt
Replenishment
Revenue/Clearance
Mgt
Assortment
Planning
Marketing
Strategy
Campaign Mgt
Service Mgt
Customer Service
Strategy
Customer Service
Marketing
Advertising
Public Relations
Customer
Communications
Customers
Products/
Services
Channels Logistics
Business
Administration
D
i
r
e
c
t
C
o
n
t
r
o
l
E
x
e
c
u
t
e
Figure 5.3: Sample CBM from the retail industry (copyright 2010 IBM Corporation)
85
Market Planning
& Communications
Customer Trans-
formation Consult-
ing & Guidance
Service Demand
& Performance
Planning
IT Management
System Control
Portfolio Value
Mgt
Technology
Innovation
Service Delivery
Control
Infrastructure
Resource Planning
Service Support
Planning
Service Delivery
Operations
Infrastructure
Resource
Operations
Service Support
Operations
Business
Compliance
Analysis
Business
Resilience
Operations
User Identity &
Access Processing
Procurement
& Contracts
Vendor Service
Coordination
Customer
Contracts & Pricing
Financial Control
& Accounting
Site & Facility
Administration
HR Planning &
Administration
Sourcing Relation-
ships & Selection
Business Risk &
Compliance
Control
Continuous
Business
Operations
Planning
Security, Privacy
& Data Protection
Business Techn &
Strategy Govern
Portfolio Strategy
Mgt
Enterprise
Architecture
Service Mgt
Strategy
Customer
Business
Intelligence
IT Business Model Information
Strategy
Information
Content
Development
Strategy
Deployment
Strategy
Customer
Transformation
Needs
Identiﬁcation
Service Delivery
Strategy
Service Support
Strategy
Business Risk &
Compliance
Strategy
Business
Resilience
Strategy
Service & Solution
Implementation
Planning
Change
Deployment
Control
Technology
Implementation
Service & Solution
Rollout
Service & Solution
Creation & Testing
Service & Solution
Maintenance &
Testing
Service & Solution
Lifecycle Planning
Service & Solution
Architecture
Information
Architecture
Information
Lifecycle Planning
& Control
Service & Solution
Selling
Service
Performance
Analysis
Project Mgt
Knowledge Mgt
IT Customer
Relationship
IT Business
Strategy
IT Business
Administration
Business
Resilience
Information
Service&Solution
Development
Service&Solution
Deployment
Service&Solution
Support
D
i
r
e
c
t
C
o
n
t
r
o
l
E
x
e
c
u
t
e
Market Planning
& Communications
Customer Trans-
formation Consult-
ing & Guidance
Service Demand
& Performance
Planning
IT Management
System Control
Portfolio Value
Mgt
Technology
Innovation
Service Delivery
Control
Infrastructure
Resource Planning
Service Support
Planning
Service Delivery
Operations
Infrastructure
Resource
Operations
Service Support
Operations
Business
Compliance
Analysis
Business
Resilience
Operations
User Identity &
Access Processing
Procurement
& Contracts
Vendor Service
Coordination
Customer
Contracts & Pricing
Financial Control
& Accounting
Site & Facility
Administration
HR Planning &
Administration
Sourcing Relation-
ships & Selection
Business Risk &
Compliance
Control
Continuous
Business
Operations
Planning
Security, Privacy
& Data Protection
Business Techn &
Strategy Govern
Portfolio Strategy
Mgt
Enterprise
Architecture
Service Mgt
Strategy
Customer
Business
Intelligence
IT Business Model Information
Strategy
Information
Content
Development
Strategy
Deployment
Strategy
Customer
Transformation
Needs
Identiﬁcation
Service Delivery
Strategy
Service Support
Strategy
Business Risk &
Compliance
Strategy
Business
Resilience
Strategy
Service & Solution
Implementation
Planning
Change
Deployment
Control
Technology
Implementation
Service & Solution
Rollout
Service & Solution
Creation & Testing
Service & Solution
Maintenance &
Testing
Service & Solution
Lifecycle Planning
Service & Solution
Architecture
Information
Architecture
Information
Lifecycle Planning
& Control
Service & Solution
Selling
Service
Performance
Analysis
IT as Orchestrator of Services
Project Mgt
Knowledge Mgt
IT Customer
Relationship
IT Business
Strategy
IT Business
Administration
Business
Resilience
Information
Service&Solution
Development
Service&Solution
Deployment
Service&Solution
Support
D
i
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r
a
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g
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t
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c
s
O
p
e
r
a
t
i
o
n
s
IT as Venture Capitalist IT as App Store Provider
Figure 5.4: “Business of IT” CBM (copyright 2010 IBM Corporation)
Figure 5.5: Mapping new IT capabilities on the “business of IT” CBM
(copyright 2010 IBM Corporation)
5 The New IT Constitution
86
Seize the Cloud
The new IT capabilities described above (IT as orchestrator of services, IT as
venture capitalist and IT as app store provider) can be mapped to this model
in the form of a “heat map,” which shows the impact on the IT department of
acquiring these capabilities. One potential heat map is shown in Figure 5.5.
In this analysis, it can be seen that the IT as venture capitalist capability
affects primarily IT business strategy and IT business administration func-
tions—at all levels. An enterprise app store primarily impacts upon architec-
ture: both enterprise architecture and information architecture, but also on
the “selling” of IT services. Orchestrator of services capability is more perva-
sive, and has a strong impact on the tactical and strategic aspects of service
development, deployment and support. There is less impact potentially at
lower levels, since these operational aspects are typically existing IT pro-
cesses for “in house” services, or are outsourced to a service provider.
The mapping shown in Figure 5.5 is intended to be illustrative and not deﬁn-
itive. Each organization’s heat map will be different depending on their cur-
rent organizational maturity, capabilities and strategy. The CBM model pro-
vides a framework for analysis, not a deﬁnitive solution.
Impact of the private cloud on the business of IT
The “business of IT” model can be used to produce heat maps for speciﬁc
cloud implementation projects. If we consider the impact of creating a private
cloud in an internal IT organization, it’s possible to produce a heat map indi-
cating the areas most impacted by the new cloud delivery models.
Figure 5.6 shows the areas impacted when implementing a private cloud. The
white areas are not impacted at all. It’s clear that cloud computing, as a new
service delivery model, will have a profound impact upon the deployment and
support of IT services. Likewise, the IT business model will need to change
to implement pay-per-use pricing, and capacity planning will have to adjust
to the implications of scale-up as well as scale-down. By drawing a heat map
using the CBM, the priorities in optimizing processes become clear, and the
scale of effort can begin to be gauged.
87
5 The New IT Constitution
Market Planning
& Communications
Customer Trans-
formation Consult-
ing & Guidance
Service Demand
& Performance
Planning
IT Management
System Control
Portfolio Value
Mgt
Technology
Innovation
Service Delivery
Control
Infrastructure
Resource Planning
Service Support
Planning
Service Delivery
Operations
Infrastructure
Resource
Operations
Service Support
Operations
Business
Compliance
Analysis
Business
Resilience
Operations
User Identity &
Access Processing
Procurement
& Contracts
Vendor Service
Coordination
Customer
Contracts & Pricing
Financial Control
& Accounting
Site & Facility
Administration
HR Planning &
Administration
Sourcing Relation-
ships & Selection
Business Risk &
Compliance
Control
Continuous
Business
Operations
Planning
Security, Privacy
& Data Protection
Business Techn &
Strategy Govern
Portfolio Strategy
Mgt
Enterprise
Architecture
Service Mgt
Strategy
Customer
Business
Intelligence
IT Business Model Information
Strategy
Information
Content
Development
Strategy
Deployment
Strategy
Customer
Transformation
Needs
Identiﬁcation
Service Delivery
Strategy
Service Support
Strategy
Business Risk &
Compliance
Strategy
Business
Resilience
Strategy
Service & Solution
Implementation
Planning
Change
Deployment
Control
Technology
Implementation
Service & Solution
Rollout
Service & Solution
Creation & Testing
Service & Solution
Maintenance &
Testing
Service & Solution
Lifecycle Planning
Service & Solution
Architecture
Information
Architecture
Information
Lifecycle Planning
& Control
Service & Solution
Selling
Service
Performance
Analysis
Low impact
Project Mgt
Knowledge Mgt
IT Customer
Relationship
IT Business
Strategy
IT Business
Administration
Business
Resilience
Information
Service&Solution
Development
Service&Solution
Deployment
Service&Solution
Support
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Market Planning
& Communications
Customer Trans-
formation Consult-
ing & Guidance
Service Demand
& Performance
Planning
IT Management
System Control
Portfolio Value
Mgt
Technology
Innovation
Service Delivery
Control
Infrastructure
Resource Planning
Service Support
Planning
Service Delivery
Operations
Infrastructure
Resource
Operations
Service Support
Operations
Business
Compliance
Analysis
Business
Resilience
Operations
User Identity &
Access Processing
Procurement
& Contracts
Vendor Service
Coordination
Customer
Contracts & Pricing
Financial Control
& Accounting
Site & Facility
Administration
HR Planning &
Administration
Sourcing Relation-
ships & Selection
Business Risk &
Compliance
Control
Continuous
Business
Operations
Planning
Security, Privacy
& Data Protection
Business Techn &
Strategy Govern
Portfolio Strategy
Mgt
Enterprise
Architecture
Service Mgt
Strategy
Customer
Business
Intelligence
IT Business Model Information
Strategy
Information
Content
Development
Strategy
Deployment
Strategy
Customer
Transformation
Needs
Identiﬁcation
Service Delivery
Strategy
Service Support
Strategy
Business Risk &
Compliance
Strategy
Business
Resilience
Strategy
Service & Solution
Implementation
Planning
Change
Deployment
Control
Technology
Implementation
Service & Solution
Rollout
Service & Solution
Creation & Testing
Service & Solution
Maintenance &
Testing
Service & Solution
Lifecycle Planning
Service & Solution
Architecture
Information
Architecture
Information
Lifecycle Planning
& Control
Service & Solution
Selling
Service
Performance
Analysis
Low impact
Project Mgt
Knowledge Mgt
IT Customer
Relationship
IT Business
Strategy
IT Business
Administration
Business
Resilience
Information
Service&Solution
Development
Service&Solution
Deployment
Service&Solution
Support
D
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e
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t
C
o
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l
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x
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Moderate impact High impact
Figure 5.6: CBM showing impact of the private cloud on the business of IT
(copyright 2010 IBM Corporation)
Figure 5.7: CBM showing the impact of public cloud services on the business of IT
(copyright 2010 IBM Corporation)
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Seize the Cloud
Impact of the public cloud on the business of IT
It is likely that a heat map for a public cloud implementation (see Figure 5.7)
will touch on many more areas than a private cloud, as the public cloud ser-
vices will be more fundamental to the organization’s core business. It’s not
unexpected that security and privacy experience increased impact, as do the
business resilience strategy and operations.
So by using a process framework (like CBM) and heat map analysis, the pro-
cess optimization requirements can be assessed and a corrective action plan
developed.
5.5
The Cloud and Service Management—
ITIL and the Cloud
The CBM heat map analysis for cloud services shows clearly that service
management is the area most impacted by the cloud. So a more in-depth
analysis of the impact of the cloud on service management processes will be
needed.
A very common and widely adopted approach for IT service management is
ITIL®. Organizations that have adopted ITIL (see ITIL in the References sec-
tion of this book) as the basis for service delivery can use it as a tool to re-
examine their service management processes and governance in light of the
new operating model that cloud requires—especially the role of IT as an
orchestrator of services, as discussed above. ITIL V3 with its service orienta-
tion is suitable as the basis for planning the service delivery aspects of
cloud.
When services are delivered by the cloud, it impacts both the technical solu-
tion and the operational process. The way a solution is realized changes, which
needs to be directed by enterprise architects (see also Chapter 6). But also the
responsibility for operational processes, their character or nature, and the
methods of service delivery and control will change. This means that service
management is highly impacted by the cloud. Due to the dynamic nature of
cloud computing, service portfolios become more changeable, which at the
same time leads to the existence of more underpinning contracts. Services
from different providers and of different natures need to be presented to the
business as a consistent set. Incident, problem and change management
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5 The New IT Constitution
needs to be carried out in different forms, depending on the nature of the
cloud services and the underlying service level agreements, to name a few
very striking examples of the cloud’s impact on service management. Cloud
computing requires a higher maturity in most of the service management
areas than we have ever seen before.
ITIL is a library of best practices that provides a practical, no-nonsense
framework for identifying, planning, delivering and supporting IT services to
the business. When moving to the cloud, it is advisable to (re)deploy ITIL
processes. In many organizations that have already adopted ITIL, processes
have become rigid and bureaucratic over time. The journey to the cloud is an
excellent opportunity to dust off these processes and improve service man-
agement. If ITIL is not already in use, it’s the appropriate time to consider
implementing it to face cloud challenges in the service management area.
ITIL is a huge library, so implementing or redeploying/redesigning it as a
whole isn’t a feasible strategy. In order to support cloud computing, Table 5.1
highlights the areas and processes to focus on. The last column of the table
illustrates the minimum requirements for service management. At least these
ITIL processes have to be changed to be able to act as a provider of cloud
services.
Maturity of service management is a key success factor in implementing
cloud services. Keeping service management in step with cloud computing
initiatives is imperative, so involving service managers (and consequently,
operations) is an important issue.
ITIL main
area
ITIL process Required change by cloud computing At a
minimum
required
Service
Strategy
Service Portfolio
Management
Make sure to present an integrated
service portfolio to end-users, indepen-
dent of service realization
Financial Man-
agement
Introduce new pricing models to provide
ﬂexible pricing (such as pay per use)
√
Service
Design
Service Cata-
logue Manage-
ment
(re)Deploy a service catalogue with
standardized services, (re)deﬁned in
business terms, avoiding technical imple-
mentation details. This should be done in
close cooperation with (enterprise) archi-
tects, who deﬁne solution patterns and
standards
√
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Seize the Cloud
ITIL main
area
ITIL process Required change by cloud computing At a
minimum
required
Service Level
Management
Deﬁne SLA’s which are set up per service
per customer
√
Capacity Man-
agement
Implement a capacity forecasting model
which can take into account the charac-
teristics of cloud related services
√
IT Service
Continuity
Management
Ensure service operation continuity;
distributed implementation of solutions
(at diﬀerent cloud providers) can put
continuity at risk, if not guarded carefully
Service
Transition
Change Man-
agement
Redeﬁne change management processes
according to the changes in responsibility
and consider automating these processes
to support the rapid provisioning of cloud
related services
√
Service Asset &
Conﬁguration
Management
Automated discovery for real time infor-
mation, as only a portion of the service
chain can be stored (as static informa-
tion) in the conﬁguration management
system
√
Service Valida-
tion and Testing
Ensure proper operation and integration
of (cloud) services in the IT-landscape
Service
Operations
Event & Incident
Management
Align service desks with cloud providers
event & incident management processes.
Consider tooling to manage and meter a
highly automated environment
√
Request Fulﬁll-
ment
Consider a self enablement portal √
Problem Man-
agement
Agree on problem management pro-
cesses with cloud providers in order to be
able to trace and solve problems (root
cause analyses)
Continual
Service Im-
provement
Service Mea-
surement
Ensure that end-users have a consistent
service quality experience, independent
of implementation
Table 5.1: Areas in ITIL to focus on to support cloud computing
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5 The New IT Constitution
5.6
Conclusion
In this chapter we’ve considered the IT capability and process changes that
cloud computing will drive. We identifed a number of specifc drivers for
these changes—self service IT, true service orientation, the harnessing of
external sources of innovation, and the increased need for integration across
multiple service providers. Based on this we identifed three new capabilities
that IT functions need to acquire to be successful in the era of cloud comput-
ing. These are the need to be an “orchestrator of services”, for IT to “act as a
venture capitalist” and to become the “enterprise app store”. We also intro-
duced the IBM Component Business Model as an analytical tool that can help
IT management map their analysis of what needs to change down to the next
level of organization and process, and considered how ITIL can also help in
an analysis of the need for new service management processes. We believe
that these changes together represent something we call a “new constitution”
for IT.
93
Case Windesheim
Higher Education and Cloud Computing:
A Match Made in Heaven
Dutch University Shedding Client/Server Past
for Cloud-Centric Future
There are few environments where cloud computing makes more sense than in
higher education. The combination of thousands of young people who’ve been
raised in the Internet age, all needing access to a variety of information and
applications, and all increasingly wanting to do so from anywhere on campus and
off, adds up to an ideal setting for capitalizing fully on the cloud’s potential.
That’s certainly what they’re realizing at Windesheim, a 20,000-student university
of applied sciences in The Netherlands that has been moving steadily from a cli-
ent/server IT model toward one that emphasizes the cloud. “We have a goal that
every application we use has to be online,” says Windesheim’s CIO and IT direc-
tor, Rob Keemink.
The school started out slowly a few years ago, rolling out an Intranet, built on
Microsoft Sharepoint, that functions more than anything as a clearing house for
request forms. When any of the school’s 2,000 staff members need anything, from
a new employee to software to classroom supplies, they use the forms to state
their need, specify any known costs, and then track the progress of their
request.
From there, it was on to a growing array of Web-based services. For example,
Blackboard gives teachers and students around-the-clock access to class-related
information ranging from assignment details to class cancellation notifcations;
an application called iExpense enables staff to fle expense reports online; and
another app, Educator, simplifes the distribution and increases the accuracy of
posted grades.
School Encountering Many Opportunities to Beneﬁt From Cloud
The opening of a second campus in the fall of 2010 has given the school a con-
venient opportunity to further establish a cloud-friendly infrastructure. Keemink
hopes to provide students on the new campus with web-based email accounts
from Google or Microsoft, either of which offers much more storage than the
school can within its current email environment. Doing so will greatly reduce the
need for servers to support the new campus’ computing requirements. (Web-
based email and data residing on Microsoft or Google servers is not an option for
94
Seize the Cloud
staff due to Dutch privacy regulations and the fact that emails and data contain-
ing personal data might pass through, or reside on, servers in other countries.)
Cloud computing also is allowing Windesheim to scale back on its existing IT
hardware. Keemink says the school’s current server room, which is located on the
original campus and houses 300 app servers and 40 TB of disk storage, will be
consolidated over the next 5 to 10 years as more of the school’s computing
resources shift to the cloud.
Keemink points out that one of the main drivers pushing the school aggressively
toward the cloud is that it no longer makes sense to support today’s students with
traditional IT architectures. “It’s completely normal for them to have their data,
their information about school, at every moment, wherever they are,” he says.
Cloud’s Impact is Reaching Far Beyond Student Population
Teachers are quickly moving that way, too, as they increasingly see the benefts
of Web-based access to applications and services. But getting the school’s board
to understand the new direction was a bit trickier.
Keemink says that when he frst tried to explain cloud computing to board mem-
bers, they had a hard time grasping it. For instance, he had set up a Wiki as a col-
laborative tool for managing campus planning over the next few years, but board
members didn’t understand what a Wiki was. He provided them with access, and
now they use the Wiki to discuss documents during meetings, rather than bringing
hard copies with them. It’s helped convince them that cloud computing brings
signifcant value to students, teachers, and the school’s IT operation.
In addition to that value, cloud computing has brought great change to Wind-
esheim’s IT staff. The required skill set has been shifting to building applications,
managing projects and overseeing cloud contracts rather than staffng help desks
or watching over servers, networks and storage equipment. “We’re seeing another
kind of staff that’s more highly educated,” says Keemink. “It’s another kind of
work in IT now.”
It’s not just that: It’s a whole new way of running a business. Or, in this case, a
school.
95
6
Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
6.1
Introduction
The role of enterprise architecture (EA) was already touched upon in the
previous chapters. As stated in Chapter 2, the enterprise architecture team is
an absolutely essential group to help guide the adoption and governance of
all things “cloud.” It is an essential part of the broker function discussed in
Chapters 4 and 5. It has to make sure that different cloud services will be
adopted in a coherent and well-integrated fashion. In this chapter we will
further explain the role of enterprise architecture. We will make the point that
without EA, cloud computing is expected to have a negative effect on costs
and agility. We will also dive into what makes up an EA practice and we will
introduce dynamic enterprise architecture as an effective way to manage
architecture in an organization. As a good EA practice depends heavily on
people, we will discuss some of the dilemma’s these people have to deal with
such as continuously balancing the short and long term effects of any change.
Finally we will discuss some EA-deliverables such as principles, reference
models and patterns that can be of great help in making decisions as to what
might be candidates for cloud services and what would defnitively not be.
6.2
Cloud Computing Requires Coherence and
Integration
Cloud computing is more than just infrastructure. It’s a way of obtaining any-
thing as a service, whether it’s software, data or infrastructure, from different
kinds of providers via the Internet. In this context, a service is a reusable
component: a piece that supports a business process executed by the business
to create value.
Cloud computing is a very attractive model for users. It’s quite easy for them
to purchase services. The big value of enterprise architecture in this context
is that the total landscape of services and solutions of an organization remains
or becomes well integrated. Enterprise architecture is the discipline that
guides the organization towards a coherent and well-integrated set of services
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Seize the Cloud
and solutions—not just technology, but also business processes and applica-
tions. If you don’t pay attention to EA, a couple of years from now your cor-
porate data may be spread across many places, your company may be relying
on way too many unreliable partners, the whole conglomerate of internal and
external IT may have become impossible to change and the expected benefts
of the cloud will have turned into a liability. If you are serious about adopting
cloud computing, it requires a long-term vision and strategy: moving into the
cloud is not a short-term visit, but a long-term structured journey.
The expected effect of EA on the adoption of cloud computing is shown in the
Figures 6.1 and 6.2. Though not scientifc, these fgures are based on our many
years of experience with EA and the adoption of other technologies and mod-
els such as SOA. The graphs show an effect that we expect to happen with
cloud too: agility and lower cost of ownership in the long run do not happen
automatically..
Figure 6.1 demonstrates the expected impact on agility of adopting cloud
computing in two scenarios: one with EA and one without EA. If cloud com-
puting is adopted without attention to coherence and integration, agility may
improve in the very short term, but unfortunately it will deteriorate. Agility
deteriorates because of the ever-increasing complexity of the landscape,
because of services that are not integrated, and because of the increasing dif-
fculties of switching from one cloud provider to another. On the other hand,
if cloud computing is adopted within an EA context, agility improves dra-
matically over time. The effect will even be bigger if you already have a well-
established EA practice.
Figure 6.1: Effect of EA on agility when adopting cloud computing
Adoption of cloud over time
Without EA
With EA
Agility
97
6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
The expected effect on costs (of running IT) is visualized in Figure 6.2. By
applying cloud computing, the costs of running IT (operations and mainte-
nance) are likely to decrease dramatically. If users are allowed to buy what-
ever cloud services they like, without looking out for coherence and integra-
tion, the effect can be even bigger in the short term. But after some time, the
IT costs will start to rise dramatically, due to the increasing complexity and
diffculty of changing services and solutions. If cloud computing is adopted in
a structured fashion where the EA team sets the principles and standards for
cloud adoption, the cost of running IT will also start to decrease, but in a
steady and prolonged fashion.
Figure 6.2: Effect of EA on IT costs after adopting cloud computing
It might be clear from the foregoing that EA is geared to the long term by
providing principles, standards and patterns for integration and coherence.
But what should an effective EA team look like in the cloud era? Self-provi-
sioning users want support, guidance and training rather than policing by a
policy department.
6.3
Dynamic Enterprise Architecture
The EA team in the organization should become supportive and proactive,
famous for saying “yes” instead of “no” and for accelerating the business and
coming up with business ideas.
Adoption of cloud over time
With EA
Without EA
Costs
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Seize the Cloud
How to make EA more supportive and pro-active? Figure 6.3 contains a model
where EA is positioned as a support process instead of an autonomous pro-
cess that is not aligned with the rest of the organization. Doing enterprise
architecture like the model suggests ensures the integration and coherence
of cloud initiatives, on the one hand, while on the other hand it guarantees
that architects are involved from the beginning, in the strategic dialogue
where they can help the organization take the right steps to the cloud at the
right moment. The architects are thus being supportive and proactive instead
of hindering and reactive.
Figure 6.3: DYA model
What is DYnamic Architecture (DYA
®
)?
DYA is a set of best practices to achieve an eﬀective enterprise architecture (Wagter
2005; Berg and Steenbergen 2006).
At the heart of DYA is the DYA model that consists of four (sub-) processes covering
the entire process of change, from strategy formation to realization:
• Strategic dialogue—through which the business goals are established and elabo-
rated into concrete project proposals by means of business cases. The business
goals are discussed in a dialogue between business and IT.
Business
Architecture
Information
Architecture
Technical
Architecture
Governance
DYnamic Architecture
DYA processes
Development
without
Architecture
Architectural
Services
New
Developments
Business
solutions
Business solutions
Development
with
Architecture
Strategic
Dialogue
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6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
• Architectural services—the processes in which the architecture is formulated and
then made available for the strategic dialogue and development with architecture.
• Development with architecture—in which the business goals are achieved within
the stipulated time frames and in accordance with the anticipated quality and
costs—in the DYA process, development with architecture is the standard.
• Development without architecture—a deliberate choice in special circumstances,
perhaps involving extreme time pressure, to deviate from the architectural frame-
work.
In this model, architectural services (such as the development and maintenance of
architecture) clearly constitute a support process. Architecture is not a goal in itself,
but a tool for managing the changes formulated in the strategic dialogue and real-
ized in development with(out) architecture. It aligns these changes so they can best
serve the business goals of the organization. Because the DYA model clearly identi-
ﬁes the key factors involved in architectural practices, it has been adopted by many
organizations.
Using the DYA model as a basis for doing EA in the cloud era tells us:
Cloud computing is not a goal but a means to achieve a business objective. •
Cloud computing is a model that can function as an enabler. The advan-
tages and opportunities of cloud computing must be discussed in the stra-
tegic dialogue. The role of EA in the strategic dialogue is to improve deci-
sion making by creating scenarios for cloud adoption. It’s not the enterprise
architect who makes the decision but business (and IT) management.
Enterprise architects combine knowledge of current business (and IT)
structures with business objectives and IT possibilities to guide the orga-
nization in the right direction.
Cloud computing is implemented using the “just in time, just enough” prin- •
ciple, as this is driven by the organizational business objectives. DYA pro-
vides a model in which the business objectives drive the cloud implemen-
tation and not the other way around.
Since EA is involved in the change from the beginning, it can create prin- •
ciples, standards and patterns for cloud adoption in an early phase. This
allows EA to help projects in an early stage instead of arriving too late and
trying to correct missteps, thereby being perceived as hindering the devel-
opment. The so-called project start architecture (PSA) has turned out to
be a great tool in helping projects in an early stage to apply the right EA
principles and standards (Luijpers 2009).
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Within this model, EA principles and standards are created only when •
there is a business objective that needs architecture. This minimizes the
risk that EA will produce an ivory tower fortifed against the implementa-
tion of cloud computing.
There is the fexibility to embark on a cloud computing project without •
architecture, but there needs to be proper consideration of the fact that the
deployed cloud services will need to be brought within architecture at a
later stage. Of course this should not be the default scenario.
Are you prepared for success?
The following six statements can be used to see whether you already have an eﬀective
EA practice in place that is capable of helping to adopt cloud computing. These checks
are founded on the DYA model. For each statement, indicate whether you agree. Use
a scale from 1 (“I don’t agree at all”) to 5 (“I fully agree”). After scoring all statements,
check your total below.
# Statement 1 to 5
1 Our EA team has a signiﬁcant impact on our IT investment portfolio
2 Our EA is described in a concise set of principles, standards and
patterns (instead of thousands of pages of blueprints)
3 Our EA team is recognized by business (and IT) leaders for provid-
ing clear guidance from the very outset of change
4 Our EA team succeeded in reducing complexity signiﬁcantly
5 The way we incorporate anything as a service is part of our EA
6 All our projects comply with EA
Your total score
Table 6.1: Assess the effectiveness of your enterprise architecture practice
• You have 6–14 points: you may have some short-term success using stand-alone cloud
services, but in the long run it is very likely that you will run into integration problems that
will prove costly. You are not in the right position to achieve a coherent and integrated set
of services. Consider how to build an eﬀective EA practice.
• You have 15–24 points: you may have some success using cloud services in limited areas,
but the long-term risks of running into integration problems are still high. You are on the
right track with your EA practice, but there is still room for improvement. Addressing the
remaining steps will help you to achieve a coherent and integrated set of services.
• You have 25–30 points: you are in an excellent position to take full advantage of the
opportunities cloud computing provides. You are in the best position to achieve a coherent
and integrated set of services. Give your EA practice a leading role in exploring the
cloud.
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6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
6.4
People Make the Practice
Organizations are becoming increasingly complex. They have become more
and more connected and are operating in a very volatile world. The number
of new options that cloud computing is offering will make it even more com-
plex. The EA practice has to deal with this complexity and fnd ways to cope
with it. This requires the EA practice to be composed of people who have the
ability to understand the drivers for this complexity and who can explain to
senior management what the options are in for example interacting with
customers or designing the operations process. Enterprise architects have to
be able to handle tough dilemma’s, like balancing the short term effect against
the long term effect, the opportunistic versus the structural. Although well-
integrated solutions might be everybody’s wish, in some circumstances a point
solution might be the best choice. In all cases the enterprise architect should
be able to explain the consequences and guide the organization to help
achieve its objectives in a coherent and integrated way while at the same time
coping with its complexity.
Another important role for an EA practice in the cloud era is to scan the mar-
ket for cloud services. This market research role fts into the broker function
of an internal IT department. By playing this role enterprise architects can
proactively engage with the business to help them beneft from the opportu-
nities cloud computing offers instead of waiting for initiatives elsewhere in
the organization. This will help them to become famous for saying “yes”
instead of notorious for saying “no”.
Here are the main requirements for an effective enterprise architect:
Excellent communication skills. •
Highly creative. •
Skills to both analyze and synthesize. •
Ability to separate the “what” from the “how.” In other words, has the skills •
to design services from a function point of view instead of a construction
point of view.
Sound understanding of business drivers, objectives and processes. •
Sound understanding of the latest IT trends and developments. •
Sound understanding of the organization’s IT landscape. •
Ability to create a vision. •
Ability to connect a vision with measurable business benefts and costs. •
Ability to think outside-in instead of inside-out. •
Leadership. •
Proactive instead of reactive attitude. •
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It will be nearly impossible to fnd all of these in one person. But in a team,
these skills and abilities can and must be present.
6.5
Principles First
Architecture principles are a widely accepted starting point for describing
enterprise architecture. Principles are general rules and guidelines, intended
to be enduring and seldom amended, that inform and support the way in
which an organization sets about fulflling its mission. They defne the under-
lying general rules and guidelines for the use and deployment of all IT
resources and assets across the enterprise. They refect a level of consensus
among the various elements of the enterprise, and form the basis for making
future (IT) decisions (The Open Group 2009). Similarly, architecture princi-
ples provide an excellent starting point in the case of cloud computing. They
can be used to decide on and communicate the future place of cloud services
in the organization. Principles can also be used to point out the strategic
advantages to adopting cloud computing.
Examples of architecture principles relevant to the cloud
Name: Cloud First
Statement: If sourcing decisions will be made about non critical services, cloud
computing is the ﬁrst option to consider
Rationale: Cost reduction •
Agility •
Implications: A list of software and infrastructure services must be available that •
clariﬁes which are critical and which are not critical
Criteria exist about when to deviate from cloud computing •
Name: Design anything as a service
Statement: Our business and IT is designed in terms of services
Rationale: Agility •
Flexibility •
Implications: Templates are available for how to design a service •
All relevant sectors like business development, EA and IT program man- •
agement know how to design services
A repository is available with all services and their status •
A service will only be designed if it has a clear owner •
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6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
Examples of architecture principles relevant to the cloud (cont.)
Name: Commoditize business services unless
Statement: IT will commoditize business services to a large extent unless the
business has a business case not to do so
Rationale: Cost reduction •
Increase reuse •
Agility •
Implications: A list of business services is available that distinguishes between the •
services that will be commoditized and those that will be maintained.
A way to make that distinction is to list the 100 business services the
IT department delivers, ranking them in priority from those that create
most revenue or business diﬀerentiation. Then, draw a line at #25.
Everything below that line will be commoditized, while everything
above that line will be maintained.
A process is in place to allow the business to come up with a business •
case to prevent IT from commoditizing a particular service.
6.6
Reference Models Provide a Map for Cloud Adoption
Principles, standards and patterns are at the heart of enterprise architecture
and important EA artefacts to guide cloud adoption. Reference models can
also add value in cloud adoption. These models can be used to decide which
components could be deployed in the cloud and which could not. A reference
model is not a design to strive for but a model for basing decisions upon. It
functions as a map for cloud adoption. In the case of cloud computing, it is
important to create a reference model that is composed in a service-oriented
way. That makes it easier to discover available services somewhere in the
cloud that match the required services. A reference model is broad in scope
and encompasses more than the cloud: it can be used as a roadmap for service
adoption irrespective of the source of these services.
The risk of creating reference models is that enterprise architects can get lost
in their models. Be careful to create these models only when there is clear
objective. Providing guidance for cloud adoption is such a reason.
Below we will introduce two different approaches that you can use to create
reference models. One is based on capability modeling and the other on
essential modeling. You will see that there are differences, but also that the
approaches can be complementary.
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Capability modeling as starting point
In this section three diﬀerent reference models will be discussed:
Business reference model 1.
Application reference model 2.
Application area reference model 3.
Business reference model
This model is the foundation and starting point for architecture reference modeling.
The most valuable type of model for cloud and SOA is the capability model (Berg et
al. 2007). Figure 6.4 shows the basic structure of such a model.
Figure 6.4: Business reference model
The value chain perspective is important for putting the business processes into a
context. The next step is to divide the value chain into relevant business processes or
domains. Next, divide those business processes into capabilities. Capabilities say on
a high level what a business does.
The model is not a detailed distinct process model, but a model with components that
can be used to build real business process scenarios. The idea of capability modeling
is to provide a structure that promotes future business agility. If IT solutions are built
on detailed processes they will (sooner or later) hinder strategic business changes. If
they are built on capabilities, they will support and enable changes.
Business Reference Model
Value Chain
Business
processes
Business
processes
Business
processes
Business
processes
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
Business
Capabilities
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6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
The business reference model should be used in all business development discussions.
This helps to steer towards the cloud and fuels a dialogue based on SOA. It also cre-
ates a common language and view of the future business. When designing this model
it is necessary to involve business stakeholders. This in itself is an opportunity for the
architects to strengthen the relationship and build trust within the business.
The most comprehensive and proven support for business capability modelling is the
Component Business Model (CBM) from IBM. CBM also consists of ready-made indus-
try models open for reuse.
Application reference model
The ﬁrst very tangible value from a cloud perspective comes when the application
reference model is deﬁned. This reference model consists of application areas, which
are a set of large application components. It is useful for ﬁnding software services in
the cloud that match these components. Figure 6.5 contains a simple example that
shows the modeling principle.
Once the business reference model is established, the task is to sort the capabilities
into application areas. It may seem easy, but don’t take it too casually. This is a very
important foundation for all forthcoming cloud architectural work. If the division is
wrong, you may end up in a situation where there are no services available in the
cloud that match with the deﬁned application areas, or even no standard products
available at all. The idea is that the areas, as far as possible without destroying the
business model, shall match services and applications available on the market, while
fulﬁlling the strategic IT goals.
In the example above, two typical application areas are derived from the business
model: Product Lifecycle Management (PLM) and Customer Relationship Manage-
ment (CRM). The connection with the business model is important because it clariﬁes
once and for all which business functions are supported by which application areas.
Another interesting aspect when working with business and application reference
models is that common service areas may come to surface. In the example above,
sourcing is a potential common service. Common means that it may be used in more
than one business process. Sourcing is a capability under product management in
the ﬁgure above, but it will also be a capability in new product supply, after market
management and plant maintenance processes. As a common service, sourcing is a
possible cloud service.
Application area reference model
The application reference model consists of application areas, which are further
detailed in application area reference models. The important thing about these mod-
els is that they clearly show the information and services perspectives. Figure 6.6 is
an example of what to aim for.
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Business Capabilities
Application Data Model Information
interface
Information
interface
Common Services
Local market
planning
Process
Services
Information
Services
Process
Services
Information
Services
Account
planning
Local
oﬀerings
Customer
data
management
Sales force
management
Lead
management
Order
registration
Delivery
control
Key data
object
Key data
object
Key data
object
...
...
Key data
object
Key data
object
Master data
object
In Out
Business Reference Model
Product
Life-cycle
Management
(PLM)
Customer
Relationship
Management
(CRM)
Value Chain – Demand Management
Market
Intelligence
Product
Management
Global
Marketing
Local
Marketing
Seize market
demand
Product
maintenance
Market
planning
Local market
planning
Analyze
demands &
competitors
New product
development
Establish
new markets
Account
planning
Propose
new products
Sourcing
Campaign
management
Local
oﬀerings
Figure 6.5: Example of an application reference model
Figure 6.6: Application area reference model for CRM
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6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
Figure 6.6 demonstrates:
What business capabilities the application area shall support, or in other words, •
what basic functionality it shall contain.
What key data the application needs to be able to handle autonomously (applica- •
tion data model). An application area can be the master of certain data objects.
The information interface describes the needed information ﬂows • in and out from
the application area. Information ﬂows are of two main types: information ﬂows
connected to more or less automated business processes (process services) and
information services that are related to real-time demand-response behavior.
Common services are services that are shared by many application areas. In the •
CRM example above, a common service from Dun & Bradstreet (DnB) for cleaning
customer data is a typical example.
Application area reference models of the style described above are very useful in
cloud assessments. When analyzing the use of an application as a service, the func-
tional and information context is suﬃciently clear. The requirements for integration
can easily be derived. The information interfaces and common services may also be
interesting to analyze from a cloud perspective. To buy one enterprise service from
DnB instead of many locally agreed services is very likely a business case. One global
health care provider used a cloud-provided information service for transformation to
and from the global HL7 standard format. That’s another tangible example of using
cloud for a small service in the daily operations.
Application area reference models are also very valuable tools when working with
standardization and consolidation eﬀorts around the application map within an enter-
prise. The models are the structure to aim for, and the information interfaces are the
ﬁrst level to achieve in the standardization roadmap. If an enterprise has many dif-
ferent systems supporting one application area, the ﬁrst step is to harmonize the
information interfaces. The second step is to replace the applications. This is a simple
strategy to achieve as seamless a transformation as possible. When the interfaces
are standardized, it naturally opens up the question about the application area as a
cloud service.
The next approach is based on modeling the essential processes of an orga-
nization.
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Essential modeling as starting point
The term “cloud services” implies service orientation. Service orientation requires
thinking in services, not just in shaping IT, but fundamentally and more importantly,
in shaping the business. This shaping should be done in such a way that requisite
supporting services are identiﬁed and deﬁned in the resulting (business) model. In
these reference models it is still undecided whether a particular service will be
obtained from the cloud or in some other way.
Thinking in services also requires overview and insight to be able to deﬁne a consis-
tent and coherent set of services, at an appropriate level of granularity: at the busi-
ness level. The total set of services required in a speciﬁc business context must be
clearly identiﬁed and for each identiﬁed service it should be clear how, why and when
it is used, from a business perspective.
Business processes are key in shaping the business of an organization. However, the
commonly used process models are based on ﬂowcharts with lots of operational
details. These models are not very well suited for shaping the organization. Instead
we prefer to view the processes at the essential level as a basis for service orientation
and for many other purposes such as controlling and steering an organization or
doing impact analyses before starting projects.
The notion of essential processes and its contribution to using cloud services in an
eﬀective way is explained below using a simple example. Essential processes do not
replace existing (operational) processes, but represent a view of these processes
based on what is essential for doing business. Essential processes also provide struc-
ture and coherence across all relevant processes, which is too often absent, and are
by nature a “coat rack” for the more detailed processes (the coats). Essential pro-
cesses focus on the use of business processes as a steering aid for management.
Imagine a simple Online Book Store. The essential model for this book store starts
with its rationale for existence: there are customers who want to buy books over the
Internet.
Figure 6.7: Essential model
In order to get the book to the customer, the Online Book Store needs to do business
with other “parties” (business domains). In this case the business domains are the
book distributor (where the books are in stock) and the delivering party (which could
buy
book
customer
Online
Book Store
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6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
be part of the Online Book Store or some third party). Also, the customer needs to
pay before the book will be delivered (Figure 6.8).
Figure 6.8: Essential model including business domains
The model basically shows the accountable business domains involved in handling
the customer request and the way these domains work together.
Doing business is indicated by the transaction symbol: the customer needs something,
the supplier provides it (or not) and the customer accepts the result (or not).
In addition to being connected through transactions, parties can also be connected
by the exchange of information. When looking into the “essentials” of a transaction
(such as buying books) information requirements pop up (for example, the need to
register customer information). This in turn identiﬁes the need for an information
object (customer), which will also be used by the delivering party to obtain the deliv-
ery address (Figure 6.9).
These elements (business domains, business transactions and business information
objects) to a large extent shape the essential business processes. There is more to the
concept of essential processes, but for the purpose of this example the above is suf-
ﬁcient to illustrate its use in relation to cloud services:
Each transaction by nature is a business service: one party needs something and 1.
the other provides it (and the transaction deﬁnes how business is done).
buy
book
customer
Online
Book Store
delivery
deliver
book
customer
pay for
book
distributor
order
book
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Each link (dotted arrow) to an information object also indicates a business (infor- 2.
mation) service: the nature of the service (e.g. register name, address and bank
account number of a customer) is deﬁned in the arrow.
The set of services appearing in all essential process models of the enterprise is a
perfect starting point for acquiring these services, whether via the cloud or otherwise
(Noorman 2006).
As can be seen above different approaches can be followed to create refer-
ence models. Essential modeling might be the right approach when working
from the outside. Capability modeling works better if the perspective is from
the inside. When analyzing opportunities for the cloud, both approaches can
be used next to another: the outside-in approach to derive the right set of
(future) services, the inside-out approach to discover which current systems
and services to migrate to the cloud.
buy
book
customer
customer
Online
Book Store
delivery
deliver
book
customer
pay for
book
distributor
order
book
<def>
<def>
Figure 6.9: Essential model including information objects
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6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
6.7
Focus on Function Instead of Construction
On the journey to obtain services from the cloud, it is very important to know
what functionality is required by those services, with what quality and how
these services ft in an organization’s landscape as a whole. However, it is
often seen that foremost and most attention is paid to the (technical) con-
struction of services. This is encouraged by many cloud providers, who have
put their proposition in technical terms, combined with service-level charac-
teristics. Of course, at a certain point in time during the integration of cloud
services, the way the services are technically constructed becomes important.
At least in order to safeguard reliability, consistency, interoperability and user
friendliness, to name a few aspects.
But before focusing on the “how” of cloud and the many (different) proposi-
tions that are offered from the many corners of the cloud, a concise architec-
tural overview of the organization’s landscape is indispensable as a compass
on the cloud journey. It facilitates the identifcation and classifcation of func-
tional components and patterns that deliver business services and, as such,
are present in the IT landscape. On an architectural level, functions and pat-
terns are technologically “agnostic” and therefore very stable. They are inde-
pendent of the current and even future way of implementation. This means
that these functions and patterns stay the same in a “cloud world.” Of course,
obtaining a service from the cloud might lead to a more important role for
integration functions (like identity and permission validation). But essentially,
these functions and patterns stay the same. This is especially valid for infra-
structure or technical architecture, but is not limited to these architecture
domains. This way of working is also recommended in the areas of business
and information architecture in order to determine what might be deployed
in the cloud and what should defnitely not be. This was illustrated in the
previous chapter.
The more things change, the more they stay the same
What is a pattern?
A pattern is a typical and repeatable way a solution is commonly provided or a prob-
lem ﬁxed. Patterns exist at several levels of abstraction, from architecture to engineer-
ing and construction. At the architectural level, sheer functionality is targeted, deﬁned
in such a way that it is technologically agnostic. A pattern consists of a combination
of functions that together provide a solution. In fact, the whole IT landscape could be
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regarded as a pattern. For practical reasons, this pattern is divided into sub-patterns
that are interrelated. Each sub-pattern describes a part of the landscape that oﬀers
some (recognizable) sort of solution. An example of an infrastructure architecture
(sub-)pattern is given next:
Application hosting pattern type
Defnition
The pattern type application hosting describes the architectural layout of solutions
that accommodate applications by providing a runtime environment and a set of
additional facilities that support the execution and integration of applications in the
IT landscape.
Graphical overview
Composition
This pattern type is made up of the primary building block types listed in Table 6.2.
Protected
Application Access
Application
Hosting
Data Center
Management
Data
Management

Load
Balancing*
Permission
Validation
Application
Platform
Web Presentation
Data
Transport
Access and
Usage Control
Data
Collection Mgt
Centralized
Data Storage
Identity
Validation
Load
Balancing*
Application
Orchestration
Distributed
Transaction Mgt
Application
Task Mgt
Service
Repository
Figure 6.10: Pattern type application hosting—ArchiMate visualization
113
6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
Building Block Type Purpose Character
Application Platform Provides a runtime environment for application
code, by means of system resources and a
library of standard routines.
Mandatory
Permission Validation Checks user permissions regarding access and
usage of application parts and/or data.
Optional
Presentation Delivers output of applications towards appli-
cation clients (screen handling), and handles
input from those clients (most commonly by
keyboard and mouse).
Optional
Web Delivers handling of application input and
output in the form of webpages.
Optional
Load Balancing Distributes client connections between sepa-
rate instances of the same application. This
kind of functionality can be applied during
data transport or be carried out by these
application instances themselves.
Optional
Table 6.2: Building block types for pattern application hosting
The adjacent pattern types provide facilities that realize the integration of application
hosting within the IT landscape listed in Table 6.3.
Adjacent
Pattern Type
Building Block
Types
Purpose
Data Manage-
ment
Data Collection
Management
Organization and logical deposition of
application data.
Centralized Data
Storage
Physical storage of application data on a
centralized facility. When used by applica-
tion hosting, in many cases the physical
storage is not in use by the application
itself, but by the data collection manage-
ment facility.
Data Transport Network Access Access to data transport resources to all
systems/platforms that are involved in
providing facilities of the pattern type
application hosting.
Load Balancing Distributes client connections between
separate instances of the same application.
This kind of functionality can be applied
during data transport or be carried out by
these application instances themselves.
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Adjacent
Pattern Type
Building Block
Types
Purpose
Access and
Usage Control
(optional)
Identity Validation Checks if provided identity claims (for
example, logon names that identify a cer-
tain user, together with passwords or other
types of credentials) can be validated
against stored credentials.
Application
Orchestration
(optional)
Distributed Trans-
action Manage-
ment
Direction of data processing that is being
carried out by more than one application
(instance).
Application Task
Management
Directs at what time and/or in what order
an application should process tasks.
Service Repository Automated overview of, and pointers
towards, (external) application routines.
Table 6.3: Adjacent pattern types for pattern application hosting
All patterns at the architectural level of abstraction are formed by a combination of
typical, technology agnostic functions. A complete collection of generic deﬁnitions of
infrastructure functions and patterns of this type can be found at Sogeti’s DYA Infra-
structure Repository (see Sogeti in the Reference section of this book).
Based on a functional overview of an organization’s landscape, the cloud jour-
ney can be planned responsibly. It is possible to determine which functions,
in which usage context, are feasible candidates to obtain from the cloud.
Clearly, it will be easier to fnd a very common application hosting service
than a very specifc scientifc computing solution. And although it makes
sense to give standard offce workers access to offce automation solutions by
means of a web server, it might not be a good idea to try to provide a check-in
kiosk at an airport by means of cloud services. So, to be sure that you get the
right services from the cloud, you should frst examine what functionality is
needed, with what desired quality, and then start looking for feasible solu-
tions. What used to be good practice on occasion needs to become the norm
as more and more possible solutions are deliverable from the cloud. And by
discussing functionality over technology every stakeholder can play a part in
the discourse.
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6 Enterprise Architecture for Cloud’s Sake
6.8
Conclusion
An enterprise architecture practice is invaluable in successfully adopting a
service-oriented approach and therefore also in adopting cloud computing.
When cloud computing is adopted without EA the risk is high that costs will
increase over time and that agility will deteriorate rather than improve. Cloud
computing, as any IT element, requires integration and coherency. This is the
main task for EA and has everything to do with helping the organization cope
with its complexity. Cloud computing also offers an opportunity for EA’s. When
they take on the market research role for cloud services, they can proactively
help the organization to quickly adopt the most business valuable cloud ser-
vices.
In order to be successful EA must be implemented in a dynamic fashion,
populated with the right set of skills, designed with a concise set of principles
and reference models, and focused on the function of services instead of the
construction. Capability modeling and essential modeling are powerful ways
to discover the right set of services as a starting point to research the market
for providers of these services. Design patterns are very useful in searching
the right cloud services because they focus on the function of IT instead of
the construction.
If done right, enterprise architecture will help to overcome cloud barriers like
integration. However, there are other cloud barriers to overcome. These will
be discussed in the next chapter.
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ING Looks to Slash Fixed IT Costs
by Adopting Hybrid Cloud Model
IT Strategy Evolves to Reap Benefts of
Cloud Computing
Sometimes, in order to fnd the most obvious answer to a problem, one must frst
walk down several paths. Just ask Tony Kerrison.
Last year, the head of infrastructure services of Dutch fnancial services giant
ING Group got approval to pursue an aggressive infrastructure refresh that
would see the company consolidate 16 data centers into just two, with state-of-
the-art power and cooling systems. ING would build the data centers itself, and
bring them online in 2012.
A funny thing happened on the way to those new data centers, though: As Ker-
rison and his team embarked on an aggressive virtualization and application
rationalization program, they decided it made sense to establish a private cloud
environment. From there, it wasn’t long before the discussion shifted to which of
ING’s applications could actually live in a cloud environment.
And just like that, building data centers didn’t sound so good.
“When you’re sitting there looking at an investment like that, you fnd yourself
wondering, should ING be building two data centers in 2011?” says Kerrison.
“We’d be looking at two empty rooms in a few years time.”
Instead, ING plans to be the anchor tenant for two data centers that will be built
by a third-party infrastructure provider. One-third of those facilities will serve as
ING’s private cloud, and the other two-thirds will be a semi-private cloud in
which infrastructure could be shared among multiple companies, but with their
applications and data residing on separate servers. ING’s mission-critical appli-
cations will be placed in the private cloud environment, while apps that have
more spiky computing needs could reside in the semi-private cloud, where capac-
ity can be dialed up and down as business conditions warrant.
IT Focus Shifting From Infrastructure to Workload Management
Kerrison has a clear goal in transitioning ING from a company that manages its
own IT infrastructure to one that is instead focused on managing workloads in a
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Case ING
hybrid environment: He wants to convert as much of the company’s fxed IT costs
and assets into variable as he possibly can. That way, as cloud services are adopted
throughout the company, he’ll minimize the fnancial drain by giving IT maxi-
mum cost fexibility.
“Our businesses will start to see how they can go to cloud providers and get lower
cost, better services than we can provide internally,” says Kerrison. “What will hap-
pen if we don’t pay attention is that we will sit on a fxed cost base, and the variable
cost base will move outside the company. The result will be more IT costs.”
Kerrison estimates that ING is saving “many millions” of Euros by avoiding the
costs of building its own data centers. Some of those savings are being used to
ensure that ING’s IT employees are ready for the cloud, which will change the
skills required of them. Specifcally, ING is launching an effort to provide foun-
dation-level training on virtualization and cloud technologies for all IT employ-
ees, with more detailed training being provided for those who’ll work most closely
with the technologies.
Parallel to this, the company has forged a partnership with some of the biggest
IT vendors—including IBM, Microsoft, Cisco, Google and HP—to create a certi-
fcation program for working with virtualization and cloud technologies. Kerrison
believes the combination of training and certifcation not only will ensure that
his staff is able to extract the maximum value from the cloud; he’ll also ensure
his employees are as employable as possible for their future careers.
Company Being Careful Not to Bite Oﬀ More than It Can Chew
ING’s emerging cloud strategy represents a dramatic change for a company that,
only a year ago, had what Kerrison described as a “less mature” attitude toward
the cloud. Now, he foresees ING developing an increasing focus on delivering
convenient services to its customers via the cloud.
“The time to market is going to be incredible,” says Kerrison. “We’ll have the abil-
ity to serve the client faster and react to market conditions better than we’ve ever
done before.”
That said, Kerrison remains realistic. He says ING’s most critical in-house appli-
cations won’t be placed into the cloud any time in the next few years. Rather, the
company will focus initially on its infrastructure-as-a-service plans, as well as
placing utility applications into the cloud, before it starts considering turning its
banking products into cloud-based services.
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ING will take advantage of that gradual transition by making itself comfortable
with the cloud. It is clear that regulatory requirements, privacy and security will
remain key factors in the adoption to cloud services. As these develop and mature,
companies will be able to enjoy the full benefts of cloud computing.
“You’re going to get to the point that you can arbitrage cloud providers based on
their prices and the services, and very easily move your workload around,” says
Kerrison.
It sounds suspiciously like the IT-as-utility model IT executives have long been
waiting for.
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7.1
Introduction
Saying “it can never be secure” seems to be the weapon of choice with which
critics try to shoot down any talk of adopting cloud computing. When they are
pushed a bit more, a score of other objections are brought to the table that
would scare even the bravest of CIO’s. At the same time, there are the exam-
ples of banks, medical research companies, government agencies, hospitals,
schools, and so forth, all of whom found a way around these objections and
adopted cloud computing in some shape or form. The reality of it is, of course,
that what for one man can be a barrier, something that prevents adoption,
someone else might see as simply one of the steps to take, or one of the chal-
lenges to overcome. In the end, it should just be a matter of checking to see if
the benefts outweigh the costs and the risk in any specifc situation.
7.2
Weighing the Issues
With a broad topic such as cloud computing, it may feel logical to examine it
as a pattern to apply to everything we do or even to the entire industry. When
we look at it this way, we may discard cloud because we feel it doesn’t ft one
or some of our activities. Only later do we realize that it may be useful and
valuable in some areas and not in others: cloud computing will become part
of the bag of tricks of any organization. In a sense, there is a parallel with the
original introduction of the Internet and email. Many of the same risks and
objections were raised then: unsecure, unreliable and sometimes an unclear
ROI. Over time, organizations have fgured out where they can and cannot use
these technologies.
Whether you use cloud for most of your IT, for some of it, or if you stay away
from cloud as much as possible, will depend on how big the risks are, and to
what extent you can counter or overcome them. Don’t adopt cloud for sim-
plistic reasons, but also don’t discard it before a good analysis.
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In the rest of this chapter, we’ll discuss the common objections and how you
could overcome them. The intent here is not to sell the cloud or trivialize the
risks, but to provide a balanced way to think about the risks and costs that are
part of the complete picture.
These are often mentioned as potential barriers to cloud computing:
“Cloud can never be secure” •
“Our regulations prohibit the cloud” •
“Cloud is too expensive” •
“Cloud has no business value” •
“It’s easy to get in, impossible to get out” •
“Integration is impossible” •
“Migration to the cloud is too hard” •
“Too diffcult to keep control” •
“Performance and stability are insuffcient” •
“The reputation risk is too large” •
“The cloud providers are not guaranteed future-proof” •
“Lack of internal cloud expertise” •
“The large systemic risks are too large for society” •
7.3
Cloud Can Never Be Secure
The issue: As soon as data fows elsewhere it can be stolen, changed or
viewed. Credit card information, health records, personal records or intel-
lectual property may be stolen. Clients may sue, or marketing scandals could
cost millions.
How you could address it: For one, not all cloud solutions are equally secure
or insecure. A security analysis of the chosen solution is warranted. To improve
security, many technical patterns are available and widely tested that guar-
antee security of communication channels, encryption of data while in stor-
age, etc. The frst, simple, approach is to create a good secure system that is
designed for the infrastructure that it runs on. And while the traditional view
is that to keep things safe, they need to stay inside your own walls, the reality
is that 50% or more (depending on the study) of security breaches are by
internal agents (RisknCompliance 2010). Perhaps the cloud could actually
help make IT more secure?
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Or as Mike Bradshaw, director of Google Federal, put it in a thought-provok-
ing way in a July 1, 2010 article in Computerworld (Gross 2010): “Despite the
concerns, cloud computing will improve security. Cloud computing vendors store
data on multiple servers in multiple locations, making it difﬁcult for cyber crim-
inals to target one location. The redundancy also means agencies are protected
against disasters.” He added: “The cloud enhances security by enabling data to
be stored centrally with continuous and automated network analysis and protec-
tion. When vulnerabilities are detected they can be managed more rapidly and
uniformly. Cloud security is able to respond to attacks more rapidly by reducing
the time it takes to install patches on thousands of individual desktops or hun-
dreds of uniquely conﬁgured on-premise servers.”
Part of this security risk is real, part is perception. Hiring some security
experts or even ethical hackers can pinpoint the real problems and fortify
your defenses while you move to the cloud.
Key takeaway: This is by far the most often mentioned objection to cloud
computing, yet it is not very specifc. The reality is much more nuanced. Some
real risks exist, and with more cloud adoption, the interest in hacking the
cloud may grow. So build or hire the expertise, address the issues early and
choose your solutions wisely.
7.4
Our Regulations Prohibit the Cloud
The issue: Some organizations are under a lot of regulation regarding privacy,
data-security or auditing. Especially in Europe, the regulations with regard to
privacy are very strict, and many governments do not allow certain data to
fow across the border (Longbottom 2008). In some cases, regulation is simply
unclear: when using services from elsewhere, which rules apply?
How you could address it: Working closely with the legal and auditing teams
is important. Very often the attitude of these people will make the difference:
are they looking for solutions or looking for reasons to say no. There is not
one single outcome: some data may very well live in the cloud, other data
needs to remain on premise. Much of the same analyses that were done
around traditional outsourcing can be applied here. Cloud providers are work-
ing hard to conform to industry regulation (for example, HIPAA for healthcare
(AWS 2009)) and become transparent enough to withstand auditing. In
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Europe, global cloud providers are building local data centers to comply with
local privacy regulation.
Key takeaway: Choose the right team and involve them from the start. Exam-
ine the options and fnd where it does (and does not) create insurmountable
problems.
7.5
Cloud Is Too Expensive
The issue: The current solution could be cheaper than a cloud alternative. A
package based solution costs less in licenses then the per-user license in the
cloud. Or perhaps the economics of “unlikely scenarios” (merger or sudden
growth of the company) is not in favor of the cloud.
How you could address it: First, make sure you do a fair analysis: both on
the cost side and on the benefts side. When calculating internal cost, take into
account things that are often forgotten: housing, recruitment cost, electricity,
backups, support desk, etc. For the external cost, take into account things like
the usage cost, network cost, and also the risks you can calculate. Then look
into potential business benefts (growth, new products, etc.). A useful tool is
to create different possible scenarios and estimate the likelihood of each of
them occurring. Make sure that all these calculations and estimates are pro-
jected over a long period of time and assume that business will change: the
beneft of cloud may only become visible when adding up the many projects
you’ve executed to simply apply patches, upgrade versions and incorporate
new legislation.
Key takeaway: Often a quick evaluation is misleading. Only if you make a true
cost analyses can you start to determine if the investment will be worth it in
business terms.
7.6
Cloud Has No Business Value
The issue: Business sponsors see cloud as an IT project that has little to do
with them. There is no clear business case or even business rationale.
How you could address it: When this issue pops up, it’s most likely a situation
where IT has positioned cloud as a mere infrastructural project and the whole
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cloud endeavor has started as just an IT exercise. Look for business needs
and consider highlighting examples such as conference calling, video hosting,
messaging and collaboration that will help put cloud more in a business per-
spective. Chapter 3 of this book, the chapter on business technology, will help.
Inspire the business by showing examples of cloud services that are available
and relevant to your organization.
Key takeaway: Talking about the cloud as a means to change the organization
itself has more chance of success then talking about it as an infrastructure
project.
7.7
It’s Easy to Get in, Impossible to Get out
The issue: The provisioning is seductively easy, but moving away from the
cloud may be impossible once people have gotten used to the cloud option.
Data could be locked into the one provider. Services may not be available
elsewhere. Migrating out could be diffcult and expensive.
How you could address it: Most platforms are very open in allowing you to
retrieve all your data. When it comes to preventing lock-in, standards and
open API’s are important. For your part, an IT and architecture process will
guard against accidental lock-in. In general, the more proprietary a cloud
service or platform is, the harder it will be to move away from it. Vendors may
try to create some lock-in, perhaps similar to the application-server and web-
server market. And, also as in the application server market, the special fea-
tures that cause the potential lock-in can be the ones that are most attractive.
In that case, balancing value against giving up some freedom is what should
be part of the business case. By using as many standards as possible, you
retain most of your freedom. Like migrating something to the cloud, migrating
between clouds or from cloud to “on premise” could come at a cost. That cost
could be estimated early on and simply included in the calculations as a
worst-case scenario.
Key takeaway: Most platforms are open and provide some exit-scenario. Tak-
ing the moving-out options into account at the start, as you do when buying
traditional packages, will enable the creation of a pragmatic approach.
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7.8
Integration Is Impossible
The issue: When using multiple cloud and on-premise solutions, they may
not work together seamlessly. It could be hard for data to fow from one cloud
to another.
How you could address it: Luckily, this has been recognized as a new market,
where both new and old players are offering their services. Middleware play-
ers eagerly attach to cloud services. There are even some cloud services that
are starting to collaborate intensively among themselves to make connectiv-
ity and integration easier: for example, moving data from Salesforce to a direct
mailing service, and vice versa. A possible scenario is that several big groups
of cloud providers will emerge where in each group all parties work seam-
lessly together. Standards play a role here too, enabling broad integration. The
lowest common denominator may be XML, which enables you to create cus-
tom integrations between any two things.
Finally, if you have a mature service-oriented architecture inside your orga-
nization, some of the internal-external integrations will become a lot easier
and make the incorporation of external services very quick.
Key takeaway: Technology is helpful, and a lot is possible already, but some-
times at a very low, technical level instead of a user-friendly, business level.
Your SOA helps.
7.9
Migration to the Cloud Is Too Hard
The issue: Porting existing application to the cloud can only be done after
signifcant rewrite of the application: multi-tenancy, state-less interaction,
different platform and storage, etc. You’d need to frst extract the application
from its current environment and then recreate the integration points.
How you could address it: The real question is whether the application itself
or only the data must be migrated. In the case of commodity software, replac-
ing is better than transforming. If there really is a need to move an application
into the cloud, there are many ways in which it can be done: running virtual
machines, building a web-interface or porting to a cloud platform. If data
needs to migrated, often some data will stay on premise, depending on the
risk and business value.
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Key takeaway: If migration is truly warranted, it can surely be done. It
becomes a matter of costs and benefts. Especially when migrating among
well-known platforms, the issues are clear, and migration should not be dif-
fcult. Using off-shore resources and automation would keep the cost down.
7.10
Too Diffcult to Keep Control
The issue: Giving away freedom makes it hard to keep overall complexity
under control. IT groups end up purchasing services, business users provision
their own solutions, and so forth. Redundancy and cost explosion are real
risks. The risk is often not truly acknowledged by business users who just
want quick solutions.
How you could address it: A facilitative enterprise architecture approach
would provide guidelines on how to use cloud and ensure an active role for
the IT department in brokering services. Business and IT governance pro-
cesses should include strong controls that focus on continuously reducing
complexity.
Key takeaway: This is the most signifcant long-term risk when it comes to
cost control and effciency of IT. Many parts of this book aim at addressing
this issue specifcally.
7.11
Performance and Stability are Insuffcient
The issue: The quality of a service may be less than was desired. Connecting
to a service over the Internet brings with it the issues of latency (the time it
takes for a message to get to and from the service) and transmission speed
(the amount of data that can be sent per second). Especially when trying to
send large datasets, these may be serious issues. Some services have experi-
enced outages. The exact quality of a service can be unpredictable because of
network issues and variable loads from other users at the same time.
How you could address it: If your provider does not deliver the service
needed, there is little you can do, apart from asking them to improve their
SLA. When it’s the quality of the network, sometimes solutions can be found
in technology: dedicated lines, distributed architecture, etc. When it comes to
outages, a striking blog post put this issue somewhat in perspective: “(…) out-
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ages happen and they are not unique to the Cloud. Natural and human-caused
disasters occur. Hurricanes and cable cuts can affect all sorts of infrastructure.
As with a traditional datacenter, in-house or outsourced, traditional or in the
Cloud, a disaster failover and redundancy strategy should be part of an IT
department’s general strategy for success or just survival” (Sheehan 2009).
When establishing the service quality, you should check more than the tech-
nology alone: what’s the support organization, what procedures are in place,
what are the dependencies at the cloud provider’s end.
Key takeaway: Establishing realistic performance expectations, identifying
what you really need, and checking the service quality are important elements
in the decision process. Good testing of the entire chain would be essential
for any service that you deem business critical.
7.12
The Reputation Risk Is Too Large
The issue: For the cloud service provider, an issue with service availability or
quality is just a small issue, while for the cloud buyer and end-user the impact
can be much larger. This imbalance may result in large differences in priori-
ties. For example, a cloud contract that states “if the service is not available,
you will get your subscription money back” does not address the massive loss
of revenue that may be the result of a service failure.
How you could address it: Cloud contracts may be fairly fxed, especially
when it comes to complete commodity services (platform or storage). Still, a
solution to the issue would be to negotiate more organization-specifc con-
tracts where the measures of success are part of the payment structure and
clear penalties are agreed upon in case of failure to deliver. In cases where
that would not be possible, choosing the right workloads for cloud compo-
nents will be important.
Key takeaway: If you can establish a shared interest, this risk will drop dra-
matically. If the risk is still too large, choosing a different (sub-) set of work-
loads would be preferred.
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7.13
The Cloud Providers Are Not Guaranteed Future-Proof
The issue: Putting important data, systems or processes in the hands of a
third party makes you dependent on the business success of that third party.
What happens if they go bankrupt? Will you get your data back? Or what
happens if they merge with your largest competitor—would they share your
secrets? Or if you’re truly dependent on any cloud provider, they could
increase their prices over time or change the service they are delivering.
How you could address it: Depending on the size of your organization, you
may have different solutions available. For example, where large companies
would be taken seriously automatically, smaller organizations may have to
gather in a user group to establish buying power. That way they can infuence
the provider when it comes to features, quality of service and price. In general,
choosing more established vendors will somewhat reduce the risk of bank-
ruptcy and radical pricing changes. The least you should do is to ensure that
there are easy ways to export and backup your data so you can retrieve it
whenever needed. As for pricing stability, this is the fipside of fexible pricing
or pay-per-use. If only a fxed budget is available, a contract should be sought
that covers the services at this fxed price: trading price fexibility for price
certainty.
Key takeaway: This is especially an issue for smaller cloud service providers.
Pay special attention to the service level agreement. If you don’t consider
these risks beforehand, they could turn out to be serious issues afterwards.
7.14
Lack of Internal Cloud Expertise
The issue: A new model requiring new skills always means an initial shortage
of those skills. Sometimes, for example, the real security risk is not that the
technology doesn’t allow a secure solution but that the people implementing
the technology are not aware or not skilled enough to apply it. Finding or
creating fully rounded cloud experts takes time.
How you could address it: Some simple solutions exist: training, experimen-
tation and connecting to others who already have some experience. Perhaps
people with traditional mainframe experience could even help. Strong focus
on cloud skills can be achieved by creating a center of excellence or cloud
team that initiates the shift. Investing in pro-active scouting of cloud services
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will build awareness of what’s available and it will help you see what is really
available today that is relevant for you.
Key takeaway: The issue is more a step in the journey to cloud adoption than
a real barrier that stands in the way.
7.15
The Systemic Risks Are Too Large for Society
The issue: When systems are connected and shared, they become a system
of systems. They start to infuence each other in sometimes unpredictable
ways. If at the same time multiple companies in the same industry are using
these systems, the entire industry or even the global economy could be at risk.
For example, if every bank were to host one crucial system on Amazon’s cloud,
a failure of that cloud would bring the country’s fnancial system to a stand-
still. Or when many companies use the same service and all of them have peak
loads at the same time because of an industry event, the overall capacity may
simply not be suffcient to serve all of them.
How you could address it: At the highest level, there are thoughts about
some sort of Internet regulator entity, which could keep track of these sys-
temic risks and try to reduce them by creating rules and policies. As banking
and healthcare have regulators to ensure the stability and safety of their sec-
tors, so would an Internet regulator play a role. At the organizational level,
probably not much risk exists today: not enough organizations use cloud for
critical processes, and the cloud usage is not yet very connected or integrated.
If you had to address it, it would be through diversifcation (deliberately
choosing multiple vendors) and resilience (creating fexible and unbreakable
services and calamity solutions for backup and recovery). You could ask the
cloud vendor how much “spare” capacity they have to serve high peak loads,
in the way you might ask a bank how much money they have to cover all the
accounts.
Key takeaway: This is not a barrier that is very real at the moment, but theo-
retically it could become much larger as cloud adoption grows. Ultimately it
will be for the cloud providers to address this issue and make it part of their
service offering.
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7.16
Culture or Overall Reluctance to Change
The issue: Changing from internal to external implies a shift in activities and
functions. Reducing the number of server administrators would leave them
looking for extensive retraining or new jobs. The people who have to enable
the change will be reluctant to initiate it for fear of losing their own position.
This goes for the developers and administrators, up to the CIO: if the role of
IT is changing, what will be my role? Even more basically, many people object
to any kind of change.
How you could address it: Resistance to change is not bad in itself: the peo-
ple who are most affected by the change often have the best arguments against
the change. It pays to listen to these objections. When moving forward and
dealing with this issue, give people time to adjust and adapt. Stay in sync with
the people involved. The personal transition and the inevitability of change
based on economic drivers should become a part of the discussion: if some-
thing can be fully automated, it will be automated at some point in time. If
your job is one that can be fully automated, it’s time to learn a new skill any-
way. Another viewpoint that will help is that some jobs will not change much,
but are simply executed by another company (the cloud provider). As the
cloud market matures, more services will be designed, bringing with it the
need for analysts, developers, testers, etc. in the cloud provider’s workforce.
Key takeaway: A very real risk for any change is the personal aspect: the
people involved. If you use clear communication, set the right expectations
and enable the personal transitions, the risk would be reduced, but it prob-
ably would not go away entirely.
7.17
Conclusion
When cloud does not offer the functionality you need, you will not move to
cloud. When there is no business case or business rationale, you will not move
to cloud. Like any technology, cloud alternatives need to be weighed for ben-
efts, costs and risks. Make sure to do so with a long view, for that is when both
the benefts and risks will become real. For now, if cloud is for you, it’s ready
to check the risks. Or if cloud is not for you, revisit the decision some time
from now and see if the balance has tilted the other way.
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Not to trumpet the writers’ organization too much, but your channel partners
and traditional service providers may add true value in the process by repre-
senting a broader view and sharing cross industry experiences.
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A Measured Approach to Cloud Computing
Former CIO Emphasizes his
Realistic Expectations of Cloud
Hennie Wesseling hasn’t bought the hype surrounding cloud computing, but he’s
hardly a skeptic. He’s more of a cloud realist; in other words, he sees it as just one
more tool in an IT executive’s bag of tricks.
In Wesseling’s eyes, the cloud at its best has become an attractive alternative to
traditional IT strategies during times of fnancial strain, as well as an option for
rolling out new IT services quickly and easily. But as any good realist would, he
holds cloud computing to the same standards any other business tool needs to
meet, refusing to charge ahead into it with blinders on.
Wesseling came to that outlook during the last few years of a 30-year stint at
Dutch frm TNT N.V. that saw him eventually become CIO of the logistics com-
pany’s mail division before leaving the company in early 2010. The last 18 months
of his tenure coincided with the global economic crisis, and capital investment
dollars were hard to come by. It was that economic reality that led Wesseling to
take the mail division’s frst step into the cloud, entrusting the parcel services
unit’s CRM environment to software-as-a-service pioneer Salesforce.com.
When the move was met by immediate pushback from IT staff due to the com-
pany’s SAP-centric strategy, Wesseling made it clear that he wasn’t changing that
strategy, but was rather just exploring his options. “I’m not saying that in the long
run, this is the best way to do it,” he says. “But I put a team on it, and I asked them
to learn about the impact cloud computing would have on the company from a
fnancial, legal and contract perspective.”
Identifying Cloud’s Unexpected Beneﬁts—and its Potential Potholes
While Salesforce met all of Wesseling’s core requirements—namely, low initial
cost and quick deployment—he says its biggest payoff was of an unexpected
variety. Facing new competitive pressure for the business of an important cus-
tomer, SAP reacted quickly with alternative pricing and licensing models, once it
got wind that the company was evaluating cloud alternatives. Add that to the list
of things Wesseling fnds the cloud useful for: as a bargaining chip.
But Wesseling’s cloud-analysis team identifed a few areas of serious concern
that, to be frank, most other companies haven’t considered. None of them are
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scaring Wesseling off, but they’ve strengthened his resolve to ensure that cloud
offerings fully meet all of the necessary business requirements.
For instance, the team pulled a random cloud computing contract from the Inter-
net and studied it, fnding a clause that said, effectively, if a client doesn’t pay, the
data becomes the property of the cloud provider. That clause, it turned out, was
specifc to the laws of the state of Texas in the U.S., where the vendor was based.
It’s a law that few European companies would have any reason to know, and its
inclusion serves as an important reminder that the language of a provider’s con-
tract is critical to whether that provider is the right one to meet a company’s cloud
computing needs.
On a related front, the team was unable to fnd any contractual language covering
what happens when a customer opts to transition from one provider to another.
Wesseling says it would be crucial to get assurances in advance that a provider
would be committed to providing the same level of service even if a customer was
preparing to leave.
But the issue that really got Wesselings attention was the long-planned move
from IPv4 to IPv6, a new Internet protocol whose main advantage is the addition
of billions of IP addresses to accommodate the exponential growth of Internet-
connected devices. According to Wesseling, most companies are shying from
upgrading their applications and networks to support IPv6, a huge investment
that delivers few immediate tangible benefts, bringing to mind the reluctance of
many companies to adequately address the Y2K conundrum more than a decade
ago.
Heading into Cloud with Eyes Wide Open is Critical
Wesseling fnds it maddening that no one seems to grasp the impact a lack of IP
addresses, insecure domain name servers, and growing routing problems in the
transition from IPv4 to IPv6 will have on the ability to get the most out of cloud
computing. In fact, he says it’s reason enough for him to consider suggesting that
any company should focus its cloud strategy on developing a private cloud, rather
than relying on the Internet-based public cloud.
Wesseling, who continues to consult on IT issues, says the depletion of IP
addresses at a time when so many business processes and so much data are being
put into the cloud is similar to other resource issues businesses are facing.
“If I start a business that’s dependent on oil even though there will be no oil next
year, will any bank give me a loan?” he asks.
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Despite the reality check such areas of concern provide, and the likelihood that
it will be years before large companies are willing to place mission critical apps
such as supply chain management in the cloud, Wesseling remains convinced
that cloud computing holds immediate potential. But before he was going to let
his company head down the path of entrusting what he calls “throw-away” appli-
cations—apps that are largely for the exchange of information internally, and
without which the business could survive—to the cloud, he wanted to make sure
the company understood the potential obstacles that might arise.
If he didn’t take such steps, he insists, he’d be letting down the company he’s
served for so long.
“Stepping up to the cloud as a blind man is a bit foolish,” says Wesseling. “I look
at this from a business perspective, not an IT perspective. If I can’t guarantee the
basics to my company, I don’t think I’m doing my job.”
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First Steps into Cloud Force Big Companies
to Get Familiar with Technical, Legal and
Compliance Risks
Commodity Trading Firm’s Cloud Opportunity
Introduced Complex Challenges
Figuring out that cloud computing might help your company is the beginning of
a long journey. The cloud represents a new IT paradigm, one that requires new
ways of thinking about data and the implications of its movement outside a
company’s frewalls. For large companies, this means delving into a process of
inquiry and discovery, and that’s just what one American commodity trading frm
had to do.
The company in question, which requested anonymity in relaying its story, is in
the process of replacing its ERP system, moving from a system running on an
antiquated architecture to a thin-client application with a signifcant grid com-
puting component. After looking at the product more closely, the IT team con-
cluded that it presented an opportunity to use a public cloud provider to host the
system’s test and development environment. Doing so would allow the company
to purchase fewer servers for the ERP system, quickly ramp computing capacity
up and down to meet demand, and pay only for the capacity it needed rather than
paying for servers to sit idle.
But there was a complex consideration: The test and development environment
could contain transactional data on the trading of bulk commodities between
buyers and sellers around the world. That meant data on those buyers and sellers
might be crossing borders to be processed on servers in countries with differing
privacy laws. It also meant that data could exist outside the company’s immediate
control.
“We knew it would work technologically, but from a compliance and legal per-
spective, there was a lot of work to do,” says the company’s IT director.
Discussion of Cloud Raises Serious Questions, Helps Get Answers
The IT team set up a meeting with the company’s compliance staff, and started
to explain the potential benefts and risks of a cloud-based test and development
environment. “After the frst 15 minutes, they all had glazed looks on their eyes,
as if they had no idea what we were talking about,” the IT director recalls.
135
Case Trading Firm
Once it was made clear that the primary consideration was the movement of
fnancial and contact information outside of the company’s data centers, the ques-
tions started fowing. Is the network in question secure and encrypted? What kind
of risks would the company face if its trading partners were identifed? How do
we know where the data is sitting? If another company using the same “cloud
service” became involved in litigation, how would we know our data would be
protected during the legal discovery process?
The company began talking to cloud providers to get answers, and it quickly
crossed Google and others off the list because of their unwillingness to disclose
the location of their data centers. Ultimately, the company went with Amazon Web
Services’ Elastic Compute Cloud, which allows customers to choose the geo-
graphic region of the data center where their information will be processed. The
IT director got approval to run a portion of the company’s test grid servers in an
Amazon-hosted environment, and as of press time, he was still awaiting fnal
approval to move data from there into the production environment.
Cloud Yields Beneﬁts, But Legal Implications Lack Clariﬁcation
As for the performance of the test environment, it delivered classic cloud comput-
ing benefts. The company was getting 80% of the throughput of its old test envi-
ronment, but rather than paying thousands up front for each server and hundreds
each month for management and maintenance, it was instead spending 12 cents
per hour on computing resources, and only when those resources were actually
being used. The IT director estimates the costs at about $40 per month per
server.
He also says the effort has yielded an important lesson—namely, that the compli-
ance and legal implications of cloud computing are not well understood, nor are
there suffcient laws and regulations to protect customers. The technology is solid,
he says, but placing his company’s core systems or sensitive data in the public
cloud is simply not an option yet.
“From a security standpoint, it’s probably more solid than what’s in our data
center,” the IT director says. “The uncertainty comes from the ‘what if?’ Over the
next year or two, some legal matter is going to prompt some laws and regulations
in this space. Because of the lack of that today, it just makes us nervous.”
His advice to other IT teams considering the cloud? Be sure you’re aware of the
risks you assume in an environment lacking clear oversight. “Before you go do
anything,” he says, “go talk to your legal and compliance groups.”
137
8
Data: The New Frontier
8.1
Introduction
This book so far has described the phenomenon of cloud computing. This
chapter moves somewhat beyond the cloud to focus on data, which is the
functional essence of the cloud. Data is the new frontier, and something fun-
damentally new is happening to it. We are witnessing a movement away from
raw data to intelligent or smart data, a movement rooted in the most nourish-
ing of environments: the cloud. There data from different sources can com-
bine and generate new information, in turn yielding fresh insights and busi-
ness intelligence and creating valuable new products and services.
As water droplets make up the real clouds in the sky, data is the critical component
of the cloud in computing. And as with clouds in the sky, data clouds can range from
single isolated ones to massive complex ones formed through the interactions of
powerful internal and external forces.
8.2
Consumer Data in the Cloud
The web has undergone signifcant innovative and disruptive phases over the
last 15 years. From the initial browser, e-commerce, and more recently the
Web 2.0 phenomenon of mass participation in community-based social media
sites, each phase has brought new challenges and opportunities. The move-
ment of data into the cloud is one such phase offering both evolutionary and
revolutionary opportunities to fundamentally change what we do with data
and the way we think about data. Questions of ownership, management, dis-
tribution, control, and privacy of data will become challenging. This is already
happening for a signifcant portion of web users. Social media users upload
their profles, social activities, and musings on to the web with a willing accep-
tance that ownership and privacy concerns are secondary to communication
and connectedness. People gladly hand over their personal details to be able
to play games or run a virtual farm on Facebook. Sometimes they don’t even
know that they have moved data from their digital devices such as phones and
138
Seize the Cloud
computers into the cloud. The services being consumed, and the types of data
that are shared in the cloud are varied, which is evident in the range of sites/
companies shown in Figure 8.1 (Meeker et al. 2010).
Figure 8.1: The cloud is everywhere today: the connected user can access a wide range
of products and services on the cloud. The user can work, shop and be entertained
from anywhere—a paradise for some! (Copyright 2010 Morgan Stanley)
Being able to see and follow activity within a network of friends has helped
drive a greater demand for transparency all round, particularly in the US.
Citizens demand insight into government activities and especially into how
their taxes are being spent. Similarly, these groups of connected users, mark-
ing a new generation of workers, expect connectedness amongst their peers
as a workplace norm. This in turn has encouraged some C-level executives to
experiment with and learn from new methods of managing and controlling
data fow, both inside and outside of their organization, to foster an environ-
ment where serendipity and good discovery become the norm.
8.3
Change in Mindset
Conceptually cloud computing has done away with the need for physical own-
ership of computing resources. It also challenges the orthodoxy of the tradi-
tional IT command and control model. Cloud computing enables the decoupling
of applications from infrastructure, of data from infrastructure and applications,
Connectivity = Cloud Computing
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in the
Cloud
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Cloud
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139
8 Data: The New Frontier
and even of data from the organization. The challenge now is to leverage this
change in mindset to maximize the potential of data in the cloud.
Large amounts of consumer opinions on products and services are being will-
ingly offered and published by consumers themselves on social networking
sites. These comments are becoming a treasure trove of business intelligence
providing market insights into consumer behavior. They are being used to
great effect by companies such as Ford Motor Company, PepsiCo, and South-
west Airlines, to name but a few (Bughin 2010). This group of active consum-
ers has driven the ﬁrst wave of data in the cloud.
Governments are behind the second wave, offering their data more or less
unencumbered in the cloud, thereby giving companies and in particular start-
ups and active citizens the opportunity to exploit it for their own advantage.
Some companies are already leveraging data currently available in the cloud.
More will do so to complement their own internal information systems.
The opportunity now exists for companies to experiment with placing some
or all of their own data in the cloud, where it will meld with other data there
and be used by others in different, perhaps even unexpected and unimagined
ways. Business data in the cloud will form the third wave.
The movement of data into the cloud has started. It is likely that large amounts
of data from governments, non-governmental organizations (NGOs), corpora-
tions, commercial information providers and web users will become available
through the cloud. We can expect that there will be many interesting oppor-
tunities to participate in making data available in the cloud and harnessing
other data there.
8.4
Data Evolution
The Internet is pervasive and is connecting, creating, transporting, and con-
suming ferocious amounts of data from increasingly diverse sources including
mobile phones, RFID (radio frequency identifcation) tags, sensors, health-
care, fnancial services, and social networking environments. It is estimated
that the amount of data on networks will triple by 2014 from today’s volume,
as shown in Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) in Figure 8.2 (see Cisco in
the References section of this book). This explosive growth will then be equiv-
140
Seize the Cloud
alent to moving approximately 14 billion DVDs over the network every month
(Miller 2010).
These enormous amounts of data support the metaphor of data being the
lifeblood of the Internet. Data is critical to the effective functioning of every
modern person and organization. This is evidenced by what has been achieved
over the last 15 years on the web.
Figure 8.2: Cisco’s Visual Networking Index (VNI) charts the explosive growth in data
and breaks down the data types
The initial web—Web 0—saw the launch and commercialization of the browser
and the birth of Netscape and the subsequent browser wars. This profession-
alized the publication and sharing of material on the web. This was transfor-
mational: the dynamic of content being easily viewed by many rather than a
few. Commercial transactions and new types of business then evolved on the
web. This phase—Web 1.0—saw companies like eBay, Amazon, and Google
defne and dominate the web.
0
2009 2010 2011 2012
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Internet-Video-to-TV
Mobile Data
Video Calling
Online Gaming
VoIP
141
8 Data: The New Frontier
The next phase—Web 2.0—sees the advent of participation and engagement
where users actively engage and communicate with each other. Web 2.0 and
social media have become synonymous (Bloem 2009). Companies like Face-
book, Twitter and Apple are currently driving this era of the web. It also marks
a movement towards a plethora of device types that are used to create and
consume content: the PC, phone, console, TV, and tablet. The movement from
publication to participation has again been transformative. The potential of
true participation and its impact on society, governments, and business is only
starting to be realized. Participation is as signifcant an event as the original
browser, according to the distinguished scholar Professor Larry Prusak (see
Prusak’s URL in the References section of this book).
Yet despite all of the advances in the web, which we now take for granted, the
underlying data that drive and enable each of the phases of the web hasn’t
changed much. Though it has transformed enormously in terms of volume
over the years, data at its core has not changed much. All of the complexity
and increased functionality of use has been achieved through multiple waves
of innovation. More complex and faster computers, routers, and networks
have helped create better technologies, methods, algorithms, and applications
with the many acronyms that are shown in Figure 8.3 (Hawke 2010; Linked
Data 2010). These have helped deliver today’s web but mask the underlying
rawness of the core data. At issue is the diffculty computer technology has in
intelligently understanding data: a router knows the destination of a packet
but not its content; a search query will return a result without knowing the
meaning of the words in the query result.
Figure 8.3: Linked data leverages the best of today’s web technology and is the
forefront of creating a smart data environment
Web Technologies
Semantic
Technologies
Semantic
Web Technologies
png
AJAX
svg
KR
Speech
Recognition
Coreference
Entity
Extraction
Theorem
Providing
DL
Logic
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GRDDL
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Linked
Data
linkback
HTML
WCAG
WebApps
CSS
SSL
URIs
RDF
SPARQL
SKOS
OWL
HTTP
XQuery
XSLT
XML
JavaScript
XPath
142
Seize the Cloud
8.5
Dumb versus Smart Data
The data underpinning the web today can be characterized as “dumb.” Com-
puters don’t know the meaning of the text forming the web pages we read.
The innovation challenge now is to make the data “smart.” With such data,
computer technology can infer meaning and do smart things with it. If we
realize that all of the successes of the web to date have been achieved on
“dumb” data, we can barely imagine what will be possible with “smart” data.
Up till now, the perception of smartness has been achieved by applications
performing more clever extraction, transformation and load functions (ETL)
to create and deliver the right information.
One of the most endearing features of the web is its ease of use and lack of
formal structure. Text is relatively easy to input and publish. Humans auto-
matically know how to read, interpret, and understand the meaning and con-
text of text data on the web: converting raw text into coherent and readable
stories. Computers, on the other hand, cannot easily complete the same task.
Without structure, computers are at a loss—they suffer from a text problem.
As most of the web is created using unstructured text, the challenge is to cre-
ate structure without constraining the ability to easily input and publish. Add
to this the enormous amount of unstructured data that is already in an enter-
prise, from emails, marketing material, customer information and feedback,
and the potential challenges ahead are daunting.
Signifcant advances have been made to create smart data and put structure
around unstructured text. The most theoretically smart data being researched
focuses on the semantic web and is often referred to as the “Web 3.0.” Sir Tim
Berners-Lee frst proposed the semantic web in 2001 (Berners-Lee et al.
2001). It is a natural extension of the current web and it anticipates a future
where computers will (semi-) automatically understand data using advances
in felds such as artifcial intelligence (AI), natural language processing (NLP),
ontologies, linguistics, and reasoning. It is a very active research topic: at
DERI, the largest semantic web research center in the world (see DERI in the
References section of this book), there are already over 130 researchers ded-
icated to this topic alone.
The semantic web is a web where data and content is linked, in contrast to
today’s web of linked pages and hyperlinks. It is a web understood by both
humans and computers alike. While the realization of this vision may be some
143
8 Data: The New Frontier
DBpedia
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castle
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Publications
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(EnAKTing)
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reference
data.gov
.uk
statistics
data.gov
.uk
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(Data
Incu-
bator)
education
data.gov
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data.gov
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(En-
AKTing)
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London
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Program-
mes
Event
Media
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Music
Brainz
(DBTune)
Music
Brainz
(Data
Incubator)
Discogs
(Data
Incubator)
GTAA
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tune
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Produc-
tions
Surge
Radio
DB
Tropes
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scrobbler
(DBTune)
MySpace
(DBTune)
John
Peel
(DBTune)
Last.fm
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(DBTune)
classical
(DBTune)
Last.fm
(rdﬁze)
Moseley
Folk
Music
Brainz
(zitgist)
Taxon
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(FUB)
BBC
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(FUB)
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DB
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UniParc
Uni
Path-
way
Gen
Bank
Aﬀy-
metrix
OMIM
PubMed
InterPro
Gene
Ontology
MGI
GeneID
SGD
ProDom PRO-
SITE
UniProt Taxonomy
Linked
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Daily
Med
TCM
Gene
DIT
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Bank
Medi
Care
SIDER
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some
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KEGG
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Pfam
CAS
HGNC
Linked
Open
Numbers
Figure 8.4: Linked data is represented by a graph. Once you enter the graph you can
traverse it and access any information attached (Cyganiak and Jentzsch 2010)
time off, the ﬁrst instance of structured smart data is already being created
and made available in the cloud. The frst version of this smart data is called
“linked data” and sits in the middle between the existing web and the seman-
tic web (as illustrated in Figure 8.3). The set of linked data is growing all the
time. A snapshot view of it is shown in Figure 8.4 (W3C-SWEO 2010): the dia-
gram shows a high-level relationship diagram of the different data domains
that are currently available, and where the links exist between these domains.
For example, the geographic references in the DBpedia data set (which is
essentially Wikipedia in a more structured form; see DBpedia in the Refer-
ences section of this book) are linked to the GeoNames data set, which in turn
is linked to and from many other data sets such as US Census data (see Figure
8.4). Once a data set is linked into the cloud, it is possible to navigate across,
access, and link each of the other data sets. Therefore, an application that
references a city, for example, can automatically access available information
about the city from linked data sources in the cloud, such as the CIA’s Fact-
book (see CIA in the References section of this book).
144
Seize the Cloud
Putting data in the cloud in its current “dumb” state is limiting in its potential.
However, exposing data in a linked, smart format in the cloud is different,
potentially ground breaking, and powerful. It benefts from the network effect
as described metaphorically by Metcalfe’s law and illustrated in Figure 8.5
(see Wikipedia in the References section of this book). Linked data benefts
from the addition of new users to populate the network, much as the tele-
phone network grew.
Figure 8.5: Linked Data benefts from being connected as the telephone did with the
addition of new users. Metcalfe’s law applies
The network effect will be achieved most when all linked data is exposed to
and accessible throughout the cloud. We have already seen the benefts from
linking computers and users, and now it is time to take advantage of linking
and connecting data.
8.6
Data in the Cloud
Several ingenious cases are emerging that exemplify the potential of linked
data for organizations. These cases cross several sectors including life sci-
ences, government, and media.
A life science example
Linking Open Drug Data (LODD) is an initiative of the Health Care and Life
Sciences Interest Group of the W3C to create open linked data about drugs.
The sources of data range from information about the impacts of drugs on
gene expression to clinical trial results. Approximately 370,000 links to exter-
Linked data
beneﬁts from being connected
as the telephone did
with the addition of new users
145
8 Data: The New Frontier
nal data sources are contained in the LODD data sets (see Figure 8.6 (W3C-
HCLSIG 2010)). One interesting case demonstrated how users fnd informa-
tion on the effect of Chinese herbs on particular diseases. The users can also
fnd relevant clinical trial information, active ingredients, and any reported side
effects. The data has also been used to help medical researchers investigate
genes of herbs and how they could help in specifc diseases (Jentzsch 2009).
Figure 8.6: Linking open drug data
A government example
High-profle initiatives, like the US government’s effort to make its data more
accessible, have helped greatly in making massive amounts of linked data
available in the cloud. Data.gov is the site to access this data, and it has a
stated purpose to democratize public-sector data and drive innovation. One
year after its launch it has helped create a community around open linked
data that includes 6 countries establishing open linked data initiatives (includ-
ing Britain and Canada), 8 US states offering data sites, 8 cities in America
with open data, and approximately 275,000 data sets being made available
(see Data-Gov-A in the References section of this book). Some of these data
sets are illustrated in Figure 8.7 (Li and Hendler 2009).
DBpedia
GeneID
KEGG
ChEBI
CAS
SIDER
RDF-
TCM
Diseasome
LinkedCT
YAGO
OMIM
Entrez
Gene
Symbol
PDB
Pfam
HGNC
UniProt
Drug
Bank
Daily
Med
PubMed
GeoNames
146
Seize the Cloud
Figure 8.7: The breadth and depth of available and accessible government data
is enormous. Its utility is greatly increased when accessible in linked format and
connected to other open and linked data sources.
It is a great example of where the old adage of “build it and they will come”
actually works. Some very interesting and diverse uses are being created
using this data. One such use is shown in Figure 8.8, which charts the percent-
age of cancelled or diverted fights by destination (see Fly on Time in the
References section of this book).
Linked Data
Services
Environment
Community
Government
DBpedia
GeoNames
US agency
US location
RECS
/2005f
RECS code
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/20082010f
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147
8 Data: The New Frontier
Figure 8.8: The percentage of cancelled or delayed fights by destination, based on US
government open linked data
A media example
The BBC created a new music web site that reuses linked data from
MusicBrainz and Wikipedia to help it deliver an enhanced and differentiating
service. A snapshot of the site is shown in Figure 8.9 (see BBC Music in the
References section of this book). Matthew Shorter, interactive editor of music
at the BBC, puts forward three arguments for using linked data (Blumauer
2009B, Ferguson 2009):
Reuse: BBC avoids wasting money in creating data that is already available 1.
in the public domain through MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.
Search Engine Optimization (SEO): more meaningful linkages between 2.
data yields better search retrieval of content.
Open Platform: a better user experience means extended session times. It 3.
also increases the likelihood that other users will access the site and bring
their music links with them, thereby extending its reach and value to all
users.
Percent Cancelled or Diverted
0.700204 4.98514
148
Seize the Cloud
Figure 8.9: BBC music integrates various linked data music sources to create a richer
site and better user experience
8.7
Tapping into the Data Potential for Organizations
As the previous examples show, the real value of linked data lies in the actual
links. These links can be exploited to access information, enabling organiza-
tions to experiment, evaluate, and innovate with new sources and types of
information. As with any type of new initiative, business executives will be
looking for a clear business rationale to justify the expenditure and defne the
benefts. These benefts could be for the organization itself, but could also be
a contribution to the organization’s ecosystem, where collaboration is taking
place. For governments and NGOs the incremental cost of exposing already
existing information to the cloud in linked-data format can be defended in
terms of serving and benefting the common good. For most commercial orga-
nizations, open linked data as a full-on business proposition is a long way off.
In addition, companies cannot contemplate moving mission-critical informa-
tion systems until the technology creating linked data is more robust and
mature. At the moment, most data that resides in organizations’ private clouds
or inside traditional platforms does not have enough classifcation informa-
tion in it to allow easy distinction between the data you would and would not
want to share.
149
8 Data: The New Frontier
In an interview, Prof. Dr. Chris Bizer, the force behind DBpedia, suggested that
publically available linked data could be used by organizations as a data back-
drop to augment corporate data. This augmentation can be achieved in an
experimental manner and quickly develop and grow into a more robust
deployed application. Most critically this can be achieved without radically
changing the corporate applications or data sets. In the same interview, he
suggested that linked data could be used as a lightweight data-integration
technology.
This approach is incremental and experimental, but avoids the big upfront
investment required in modeling global schemas used in classic data-ware-
housing projects (Blumauer 2009A).
As of April 2010, the DBpedia dataset describes more than
3.4 million things, out of which 1.5 million are classiﬁed in a
consistent manner, including 312,000 persons, 413,000 places,
94,000 music albums, 49,000 ﬁlms, 15,000 video games,
140,000 organizations, 146,000 species and 4,600 diseases. The data set features
labels and abstracts for these 3 million-odd things in up to 92 diﬀerent languages;
1,460,000 links to images and 5,543,000 links to external web pages; 4,887,000
external links into other RDF datasets, 565,000 Wikipedia categories, and 75,000
YAGO categories. (see Wikipedia in the References section of this book).
At the Semantic Technology 2010 conference, linked data was described as a
viable means of augmenting corporate data and creating better information
for applications in fnancial services. Sample applications include (Semantic
Universe 2010):
Mergers and acquisitions. •
Anti-money laundering. •
Anti-counterfeiting. •
Customer and market analysis. •
Business intelligence. •
Like many large data sets, linked data needs to be sourced, cleansed, pack-
aged, and of good enough quality and accuracy to be of use to organizations.
Maintaining or verifying it might be done by corporations themselves, but can
also be taken on by third parties. Real value and intellectual property (IP) can
be created from this type of data, which creates new business opportunities
150
Seize the Cloud
for the companies themselves, incumbent information providers and start-
ups alike.
8.8
Challenges
As with any technology or phenomenon that is new and evolving, linked data
in the cloud introduces a whole raft of new concerns for C-level executives.
These concerns need to be examined before taking big steps in sharing data
publicly or using someone else’s data. The challenges can be grouped into
three sections: legal, data, and technology.
As linked data itself is new and evolving, legal opinions are also entering new
and uncharted territories. Principal amongst these is that actual ownership,
location, and consumption of data may reside simultaneously in different
jurisdictions with conficting regulatory, legal, IP, and privacy requirements.
Established governance, regulatory, and legal frameworks may also not be
appropriate. As computers can infer meaning from linked data, possibly mis-
leading or untrue statements could be created, leading to all sorts of potential
legal problems (Harley et al. 2009). At the same time, the regulatory and legal
frameworks that are currently in place are probably not yet ready to cover
large-scale adoption and use of linked data by organizations. This too will add
to the legal concerns. However, innovative technology solutions and the neces-
sities of businesses to innovate and participate in this space will help replace
legal uncertainty with legal clarity. It only takes a few pioneers to lead the way,
greatly helping other organizations’ adoption.
From a data perspective several interesting issues arise, some of which also
hold true for more traditional data sources. They include:
Attributing authorship of original and derivative data. •
Knowing the quality and the accuracy of the data and its source. •
Dealing with data duplication and disambiguation (resolving conficts in •
meaning).
Identifying data source and lineage (or • provenance) and knowing the
retention requirements for difference types of data across various jurisdic-
tions.
A recent Pew Research Center report expressed wariness about further
exposing private information to governments, corporations, thieves, oppor-
tunists, and human and machine error (Anderson and Rainie 2010). A lot of
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8 Data: The New Frontier
these issues are evolving in the social media space and solutions to most of
these issues are being created as they arise.
When it comes to analyzing data, companies like Google handle text differ-
ently from most organizations. Traditional web development environments
(for example, LAMP: Linux, Apache, MySQL, and PHP) fnd it diffcult to scale
and process large volumes of data. Newer technologies (like Hadoop and
NoSQL) are becoming available to overcome these diffculties. Acquiring the
competencies to use these new and emerging technologies will take time, and
these skills will initially be scarce.
Hadoop is a software framework that enables applica-
tions to work with thousands of nodes and massive
amounts of data.
NoSQLs are next generation databases that are non-
relational, distributed and scalable. MongoDB is one
such database.
Additional technical complexities arise in creating, curating and provisioning
data if real-time access to information is required, such as in fnancial ser-
vices and new media. Latency or lack of bandwidth can also be a problem,
depending on particular business and data needs. As new requirements and
demands are being created, new technologies will be developed to satisfy
these needs. Technological obsolescence is therefore a problem.
8.9
Conclusion
Something new is afoot regarding data. Gone are the days of data created in
a manner that renders it “dumb” and non-intelligent to computers. Making
data “smart” is the next big thing—the new frontier. Computers can discover,
interpret, and manipulate data and infer meaning with smart data, and linked
data is a frst step in this direction. Governments are in a frst wave that aims
to make data more accessible to citizens and commercial entities. Industry is
following, with news media and life sciences in particular showing some early
promise. Other industries are closely behind. Linked data affords organiza-
tions the opportunity to look at and exploit data differently; decoupled from
technology, applications, and indeed the organization itself, it offers a cost-
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effective way to experiment with diverse data sources. These sources can be
private, partner, public domain, or third-party information providers. Linked
data presents the opportunity to truly tap into a vast resource of data and
convert it into real information and knowledge. Companies that plan for and
innovate around this new type of data will engage with their customers, part-
ners, and competitors differently and will bring new types of product and
services to market faster. Data is innovation. Data is the new frontier.
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Case Reinier de Graaf Groep
Transformation Specialist Helps Reinier de
Graaf Groep Find its Way in the Cloud
Fresh Perspective Leads Hospital Group’s Move
into Cloud Computing
It’s no wonder that many IT executives drag their feet on cloud computing; it’s a
whole new computing paradigm that requires them to look at their jobs—and at
IT as a whole—from a totally different perspective. That can be a signifcant chal-
lenge in the context of daily work responsibilities, which is why sometimes the
impetus to consider something new like cloud computing requires just that: a
fresh perspective.
Reinier de Graaf Groep, the oldest hospital group in The Netherlands, with
500 beds at 6 hospitals in the western region of the country, has learned this frst
hand. The company recently wrapped up a nearly two-year period in which Ben
Gorter, an IT transition specialist, served as acting CIO overseeing the transfor-
mation of an IT department that had become a serious handicap. Perhaps the
most important tool Gorter relied upon to engineer that transition was a concept
that had been totally foreign to the Reinier de Graaf, namely the cloud.
Gorter says that when he arrived on the scene in late 2008, there was a litany of
problems. A lack of capital investment in IT had resulted in an operation saddled
with aging, obsolete equipment. The IT staff had been whittled down to a skel-
eton crew that lacked the knowledge needed to run a hospital IT environment.
Worse yet, Reinier de Graaf was spending just 2.1 percent of its budget on IT, far
below industry norms.
Gorter was able to tackle the last issue by convincing hospital leadership to pump
up IT spending to 4.5 percent of the budget, and he’s been assured that will rise
to closer to 6 percent in the future. Capital investment dollars remained scarce,
however, and Gorter decided to wait on bolstering the staff until he had a clear
idea of what was needed. He began to look at applications, and quickly identifed
his frst priority: The hospital’s email system was in dire need of replacement.
Given the limited capital available, he suggested that a cloud solution would be
cheaper, easier and—most importantly—faster to deploy. And this was coming
from a then-self-avowed cloud computing skeptic.
“Initially, I was not so convinced that the cloud was going to have a huge impact,”
he says. “But now, I think it will have a very large impact on IT and delivery.”
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Initial Cloud Success Provides Momentum for Further Eﬀorts
Gorter’s confdence in the cloud was buoyed by the subsequent success of the
cloud-based Microsoft Exchange environment adopted by Reinier de Graaf. That
service, hosted by a Microsoft partner, proved to be even more effcient, depend-
able and available than was hoped, and it emboldened Gorter to make the cloud
a larger part of Reinier de Graaf’s ongoing implementation of his IT transforma-
tion plan.
The move toward the cloud is progressing to a more comprehensive Microsoft-
centric strategy in which the software giant itself will take over hosting of the
hospital’s Exchange environment and combine that with cloud-based instances
of SharePoint (collaboration), Offce Communication Server (presence) and Live-
Meeting (web conferencing).
Gorter also has spurred Reinier de Graaf to entrust its hardware and services to
an unidentifed infrastructure-as-a-service provider, a transition that was set to
occur by the end of 2010, and is expected to yield a vastly improved computing
capacity at a low up-front cost and with minimal staffng requirements. It also
will give the hospital a lot of fexibility to scale its resources up or down should
it decide to merge with another hospital, Gorter says.
But such a move is no small consideration when patient data is at issue. That’s
why hospital leaders brought in consultants from Ernst & Young to advise them
on the contract specifcs they’d need to guarantee that patients’ privacy would be
adequately protected.
Going forward, Gorter foresees additional opportunities for Reinier de Graaf to
tap the cloud, most notably for systems management tools, ERP components such
as fnancials and human resources, and even X-ray systems. (Conversely, he says,
hospital systems that contain personal health records won’t go the cloud route
any time soon.)
Big Change Brings Pain, But Also Quick Results
All of the benefts aside, Reinier de Graaf’s cloud strategy hasn’t been without its
opponents. In fact, Gorter says that a full one-third of the hospital’s IT depart-
ment has left due to not wanting to be part of the transition. And those who have
stayed have struggled in adapting to a new protocol-intensive approach to IT that
allows for less improvisation and independence.
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Case Reinier de Graaf Groep
“It’s a very predictable way of working, but IT people have to follow the rules,”
says Gorter. “It’s not their best competence, and that’s one of the competencies
we’re looking for: You have to follow rules.”
While a rule-oriented cloud environment may not make for an attractive job list-
ing, it does signifcantly speed up the process of transforming an IT operation,
and that was Gorter’s primary goal. He says other IT executives engineering IT
transformations would be wise to piggyback on his experience.
“Cloud computing is an opportunity. You can build things on your own, you can
buy things on your own, or you can buy services from cloud providers,” says
Gorter. “When you want to make a transition very fast, when your problems are
very large and very diffcult and you need to move quickly, it’s an opportunity you
should consider.”
Strong words from a former cloud skeptic.
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9
Creating Your Roadmap
9.1
Introduction
Throughout this book, we have seen that adopting cloud computing is not only
a technological change, but that it has a far-reaching impact. Signposts like
business technology, new ways of (self) provisioning and the importance of
enterprise architecture can be found throughout the previous chapters. In this
fnal chapter, we’ll survey and add directions and concrete suggestions that
will help you take the next step. The chapter will help you build your roadmap
to the cloud.
Of course, the one universal roadmap for cloud computing does not exist. The
exact steps you will take all depend on your organization, your goals and, to
a lesser extent, on your current technology. Even the order in which to take
the steps may be different from organization to organization. One might
choose to start with server virtualization as a step to more responsive IT,
where another might jump ahead by signing up for Salesforce.com. Some
might choose to quickly embrace cloud as the default option, while others will
use it sparingly where risks are low and return almost immediate.
Where to start
As long as the considerations around cloud computing remain abstract, it is
very hard to defne any action or even quantify its real value. Early on, you
should make an effort to discuss some specifc applications of cloud comput-
ing, cloud services or even the separate concepts that make up cloud. For
example, you could examine virtualization or chargeback on its own, to see if
it makes business sense to adopt it. Or you could look into the specifc oppor-
tunities for embracing web-based email. At the same time, keep an eye on the
bigger transformation towards cloud that is taking place, too.
When cloud computing is embraced in its entirety, there will be new initiatives
across the whole organization: there will be activities to change IT, activities
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to bring change to the business side and, most of all, there will be changes to
the interaction and collaboration between business and IT.
Figure 9.1: Changes due to cloud computing
In the ideal world, you would take steps towards cloud computing in all areas
simultaneously, right from the start. Ideally, business and technology will work
closely together to craft a new way of leveraging technology in business. It is
the best way to build the readiness and skills needed. More fexible IT without
a business process to apply it will not produce the desired business agility. Or,
vice versa, business users who are self-provisioning their IT from the cloud
but do not interact with the IT team will ultimately run into trouble. Reality
in your organization may dictate that one of these areas has to be addressed
frst, but activities in the other areas should follow shortly thereafter.
9.2
Business Changes Toward Cloud Computing
Figure 9.2: Business changes due to cloud computing
As discussed in Chapter 3, information technology is changing into business
technology. In organizations that fully realize the role and importance of IT,
the business side of the organization takes control and is becoming more tech
savvy. This does not happen automatically, and requires the initiation of some
new processes or one-time activities.
Grotesk Light 9pt
Grotesk Reg 9pt
Grotesk Light 8pt

IT Changes
Business Changes
Business IT Interaction Changes
Business Changes Increase Tech-savvy
Dynamic Partnering
Self-provision
Experiment
New Budgeting
Business Technology
Ecosystem Company
“Data as the new frontier”
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9 Creating Your Roadmap
The activities that help the business adopt cloud computing are:
Experiment and examine current “rogue” cloud usage
It is quite possible that there is already rogue cloud IT in the organization.
For example, users may have found an online tool that suits their needs for
one particular process. This would be a good starting point to help the busi-
ness understand the complete reality of using cloud resources: the benefts
and the issues. If there is very little or no use of cloud services yet, you can
initiate some experimentation on the business side. For example, try some
new tools for marketing, project support or communication (yammer.com or
IBM Lotus Live come to mind). This way, some business users will get the
experience of choosing and signing up for their own IT, and will learn the
issues that come with it. In the process, they may actually fnd some business
relevant services that they want to keep for real!
Increase technological savvy
A longer-term strategy will be increasing the technology skills of business
executives. Perhaps taking a well-known piece of technology like the smart-
phone as a starting point, the discussion should encompass the reality of
connecting to other companies through technology, user-driven innovation
and the role digital services play in the core products and processes of the
company. Establish a “digital ﬁrst” vision that describes how the digital realm
will be used to be competitive and customer oriented. The goal here is not to
train executives in the fner details of database construction, but the overall
concepts of strategy for and with technology should be clear.
Reconsider budgeting practices
When IT conforms more to the pay-per-use model, the business budgeting
should change accordingly. After cloud computing starts to gain some momen-
tum, the practices around budgeting and fnancial management as a whole
should be ready for a model where costs are calculated per transaction, per
user or whichever granularity is relevant for the business. Make special note
of the upward fexibility in case of unexpected success: if for example there
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is a sudden increase in the number of orders placed, the overall cost of IT will
increase accordingly. In that case “breaking” the budget would be good!
Other activities
Extending the discussion around business intelligence, the business plans
and ambitions should start to take into account the value and potential of data
inside and outside the company. As discussed in Chapter 8, sharing data and
using shared data is growing fast, and the organizations that will beneft most
are the ones that learn fast and use the data to their beneft. Discover hidden
value by fnding out which data could actually be valuable to others, and fg-
ure out which partners could have data that would improve your own pro-
cesses or decisions. This could be one step on the path to becoming an orga-
nization that is turning into an ecosystem player, using other parties to help
create the end experience, product or service best and most effciently.
9.3
Addressing the Business-IT Interaction
Figure 9.3: Business-IT interaction changes due to cloud computing
As we discussed in several of the previous chapters, the interaction between
business and IT is an area where many developments occur as you’re adopt-
ing cloud computing. The most important interactions of enterprise architects
take place in this area, and this is where the strategic decisions for IT are
being made. In this strategic dialogue long-term and short-term consider-
ations need to be addressed and here you sort the standard, infrastructural
elements of the business from the unique, innovative and competitive parts.
There are several activities you can undertake to improve the business-IT
relationship while discovering the opportunities of cloud computing:
Business IT
Interaction Changes
Enterprise Architecture
Evaluate Value
Business-IT Strategy
Services Portfolio
Innovation Committee
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9 Creating Your Roadmap
Do a joint discovery exercise
Let a group of IT and business people meet face-to-face and discuss your
business drivers and how the different new IT developments can help. In a
workshop format, a shared vision can be created that gives a clear direction
and prioritization of possible options. Areas where cloud could be valuable
and viable can be identifed, and usually a workshop like this is a great oppor-
tunity to tighten the relations between business and IT people. Such a work-
shop is valuable for alignment around any IT innovation, but especially in the
case of cloud computing.
The real business drivers are sometimes surprisingly hard to fnd or formu-
late on the spot, so some preparation is needed here. Also, the IT people
should be prepared to present the different elements of cloud, as they can be
valuable to business. In most cases, some related technologies are included,
too: for example, mobile computing or web technology in general. This exer-
cise is often done with help from external consultants who do the workshop
preparation, moderation and reporting,* but it can also be executed com-
pletely by your own team.
This discovery exercise might include, after discussing the business drivers,
presenting a range of cloud services, introducing them briefy and seeing how
they can match up with the business drivers. It could be the frst step to the
creation of a cloud portfolio.
Create the business case
After fnding some areas where cloud computing might be useful, a business
case can be made. In some instances it will be fairly straightforward to calcu-
late costs and returns, while in other cases the best you can do is establish a
rationale or vision as to how cloud would be valuable. If no hard ROI can be
proven, it does not necessarily mean no ROI will be attained in the end. It may
be a business decision to invest in an area that looks promising, but currently
is not mature enough for a solid business case: perhaps adopting an industry-
specifc cloud solution or choosing a relatively new startup company to pro-
vide business process integration online.
* Sogeti oﬀers this service under the name of TechnoVision™ (Hessler).
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An easy business case can be calculated for things that are more or less stan-
dardized: virtualization as part of your private cloud initiatives, email in the
cloud or collaborative platforms in the cloud. Weighing cost, benefts, oppor-
tunities and risks of a traditional solution against the cloud solution should
give a good indication whether cloud, in this situation, is the smart thing to
do. As mentioned before, in the case of a pay-per use service, these calcula-
tions need to have some scenario-planning variables in them, too. What will
happen over time, and how would that change the outcome of your compari-
son? Finally, even though these business cases are relatively straightforward,
unless you have a real understanding of your current costs of operations,
housing, power, people, recruitment, etc., and also the value of your current
level of quality, support and IT dedication, it will be hard to make a fair com-
parison. In the case of a new solution, these comparisons will be easier than
in the case of migrating existing systems or infrastructure. When you are
looking for an easy project to start, a new application is therefore the pre-
ferred option.
Find your entry point and potential quick wins
An important part of the dialogue between business and IT should address
what is a good way to get started with cloud? Which project will you start
with? Naturally, you will look for something that is not too large and complex,
that demonstrates the value of cloud computing, and that can create some
visibility inside the organization. You have the choice of starting in the public
cloud, “outside in,” or starting with the private cloud, “inside out.” Quite a few
private cloud projects primarily aim at reducing costs and improving the agil-
ity of internal IT, but do not aim to offer new functionality. As a result, the
business visibility could be less than what would be achieved with a more
functionally oriented public cloud project. Still, some private cloud projects
will offer new and highly desirable features to the business. Examples are
data mining, analytics or searches.
If you are really looking for innovation and want to experience the collabora-
tive and connected nature of some cloud solutions, you could look for an
internal system that is most related to one or more of your important trading
partners and look for a cloud solution that could enhance the process: for
example, by increasing automation, providing better information, bringing
together multiple parties, offering better functionality and lowering costs for
both parties, etc.
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9 Creating Your Roadmap
At IBM, workloads have been identifed that offer the most favorable entry
points for public and for private cloud delivery models (IBM 2010). These
workloads are based on the analysis of study data and experience with actual
cloud implementations. For organizations interested in piloting a public cloud
service, the workloads listed in Table 9.1 are the projects that would likely
pose the lowest risk and offer highest potential return. The same holds true
for the workloads listed as top candidates for private cloud implementation.
Public cloud entry points Private cloud entry points
Audio/video/web conferencing Data mining, text mining, or other analytics
Webhosting Data warehouses or data marts
Test environment infrastructure Test environment infrastructure
VoIP Infrastructure Business continuity and disaster recovery
Variable storage Developer platforms
Software as a service Long-term data archiving/preservation
Table 9.1: Workload recommendations
Not everything is suited for the cloud yet. Mission-critical applications, highly
sensitive data workloads (such as employee and healthcare records), multiple
codependent services (such as high throughput online transaction process-
ing) and workloads requiring a high level of auditability and accountability
(such as those subject to Sarbanes-Oxley) are not the preferred entry points
for cloud computing (IBM Smart Business 2010).
Create a continuous innovation process
A joint discovery workshop is a good start, but even better would be to have
a continuous dialogue about the company, strategy, projects, IT strategy etc.
This strategic dialogue can have many forms. It can be embedded in frequent
individual contacts between many different people, or it can take the form of
regular meetings of an “innovation board.” There could be online support
tools, collaboration spaces and even crowdsourcing initiatives where a large
number of people are invited to think about innovation and strategy. By
including IT in this process, the organization will come closer to the business
technology ideal and be better positioned to take advantage of new technology
frst. What would you have done if the iPad had been on your horizon from
the day it was announced? Could you have created an app or complete appli-
cation that would have used the mobile, connected, location-aware, personal
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nature of this new computing device? The same goes for many upcoming
cloud services: if you are the frst to use them, you’ll have an advantage, pro-
vided you can weed out the ones that are not going to make it.
Looking at how and where cloud can be useful is not a one-time exercise. Your
enterprise IT strategy will continuously redefne where the boundary between
internal and cloud lies. Over the years, new developments will keep changing
that boundary. Things that were too costly to move to the cloud will have
become cheaper, applications that were once deemed unft for cloud may fnd
a good cloud alternative, and concerns that cannot be addressed today may
no longer be problems for new services or service providers. All of this can
be part of the innovation process, or the enterprise architecture dialogue;
probably they are one and the same, since the people who would be involved
in innovation are the same people who would be involved in enterprise archi-
tecture.
If your company is not ready for any of this, the easy low-key start would be
for the CIO and enterprise architects to occasionally invite someone from the
business for a one-on-one lunch or late-afternoon casual brainstorm on how
IT could ideally be used in your organization. This would build a network of
supporters who could, in a later stage, help bring about change.
Use enterprise architecture from the start
Cloud computing has the inherent risk of losing control. As mentioned in
Chapter 6, this is not a bad thing, as long as the risk is an informed one and
the biggest risks are countered by some preventive measures. Long-term and
short-term success are not opposites, but it takes careful maneuvering to
achieve both.
Enterprise architecture is essential in guiding the development of the IT land-
scape when implementing cloud solutions and making sure the technology is
continuously in line with the business drivers (see Chapter 6). EA makes it
possible to defne the functionality, the quality and the structure of solutions,
regardless of the manner of implementation. From this perspective, the tech-
nical implementation of these solutions is guided by the oversight that is
needed when the components that realize those solutions can reside every-
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9 Creating Your Roadmap
where. To apply enterprise architecture well in the case of cloud computing,
the following activities are relevant:
Reverse architecture the existing landscape, in order to discover the ser- 1.
vices and patterns in use by the organization and the variants of these
services and patterns deployed.
Defne the future state (to be) of services and patterns that are eligible for 2.
(partial) cloud implementation and realization. For every feasible scenario,
an architectural study and impact analysis should be provided, using pat-
tern variants as an outline to defne and construct these artifacts.
Establish which deployment options are optimal, appointing feasible cloud 3.
candidates for delivery of services involved. This is based on a cloud clas-
sifcation approach that weighs the business value and commodity factor
of each pattern and/or service variant. This step should be carried out in
tandem with establishing the service portfolio and mapping the business
capabilities onto services.
Guide the composition of request for proposals by providing functional 4.
descriptions of each pattern and service variant that is a cloud candidate.
This description should contain:
A defnition of functionality; •
Purpose and goal of the variant; •
Additional characteristics; •
Quality aspects to be met; and •
Implementation guidelines and standards that are important for inte- •
gration of this functionality within the IT landscape as a whole.
Provide the same descriptions for services and patterns that remain the 5.
responsibility of the organization, but are affected by the deployment of
facilities in the cloud. This provides a full overview of the changes that take
place when implementing cloud services.
Guide the implementation, testing and deployment of cloud services and 6.
the (re)design and testing of internal facilities that are affected by cloud
implementation.
If you have no mature enterprise architecture practice, establishing one would
be recommended for many reasons, and especially for making cloud comput-
ing a success.
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9.4
Getting IT Ready for Cloud
Figure 9.4: IT changes due to cloud computing
In the IT department, cloud computing has two distinct areas of impact: one
is the technology itself, what technology we use and how it integrates. The
other is the process of creating, provisioning and operating IT: the inner
workings of the IT department.
IT process changes
Figure 9.5: IT process changes due to cloud computing
Including external cloud services in the corporate IT domain will have an
impact on other dimensions of IT. Cloud may offer new or different function-
ality for the same process, the quality of the service may be different, or more
practically, simple things like the way backups and restores are done could
be entirely different. Also, for private clouds, there will be an impact on the
IT processes.
You can initiate changes to prepare the IT process for cloud computing:
Embrace enterprise architecture in IT
Having enterprise architecture as a practice and as a process for aligning
business and technology will only work if conforming to architectural prin-
ciples is part of everyday life in the IT department. EA should be geared
towards making the architecture guidance easy to digest and receptive to
projects and other IT activities, but strong commitment is needed on the part
of, for example, project managers and (senior) IT management.
IT Changes
IT Process Changes
Technology Changes
IT Process Changes
Broker Function
Cloud-Buy-Build Strategy
New IT Metrics
Quality Process
Chargeback
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9 Creating Your Roadmap
For example, the infrastructure architecture methodology introduced in Chap-
ter 6 should give you concrete tools to talk about the cloud from the infra-
structure up, but it will only work if the people who actually work on infra-
structure projects use it to guide their decisions.
Deﬁne and fulﬁll the cloud broker function
If the IT department wants to coordinate the journey to the cloud, it should
at least function as a broker between business and end-users on the one hand
and cloud service providers on the other hand (see Chapter 5). This much-
discussed broker function is, on the one hand, very straightforward (simply
match supply and demand) and, on the other hand, it may turn out to be the
difference between winning and losing market share.
In essence, the broker function has an internal side, of knowing the demand
and potential future demand, and it has an external side, of pro-actively scout-
ing for possible services that can be relevant to the business. To start the
broker function, all it takes is some time for people to initiate both sides:
defne expected demand and do a market scan of potential new services.
But once the number of services managed by the broker function starts grow-
ing, there will be additional demands on the broker: guaranteeing quality,
continuity, reducing risk and watching for legal issues. If you use a broker-
selected cloud service, you should be able to trust the parties who deliver
services that may be business-critical or who store data that might be sensi-
tive. This trust should be underpinned by proper legal contracts and service
agreements. When setting up the broker function for the cloud, it is advisable
to set up profles of potential provider companies, containing criteria regard-
ing fnancial and legal aspects, compliance, security, personnel, location, etc.
These profles can be used when including new services into the corporate
set of solutions.
As a long-term goal, it may be useful to keep the concept of a corporate app
store in mind: a self-provisioning portal where users can sign up for applica-
tions and services that are relevant to them. In this app store, you would pres-
ent the complete portfolio of internal and external applications in a user-
friendly way. Populating the app store would be the responsibility of the cloud
broker.
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Start using a service portfolio
To fulfll the role of broker well, a consistent, extensive and dynamically
maintained service portfolio is indispensable. The IT department builds such
a portfolio with internal and external services selected for their functional
excellence, innovation, service excellence and cost characteristics. Managing
this portfolio is a new IT capability that goes beyond traditional supplier
management. To set up a portfolio, you make an inventory of business capa-
bilities (see Chapter 6) and map them onto the services they need. This way,
a good understanding can be obtained about the use of services, the way they
are re-used or shared, and the importance of the services for the proper
operation of business processes (service priority).
Defne and describe services in a technologically agnostic manner, in order
to provide a clear overview of the functionality, quality and features of the
services that are being delivered by the IT department, regardless of the way
they are realized. At the same time, these defnitions provide the require-
ments that architects can use to select feasible solutions, determining whether
valid cloud candidates exist or not. In their turn, architects can provide input
for the description of services by providing pattern defnitions that describe
the functional appearance of solutions.
Become more speciﬁc in cost allocation
To implement a service portfolio, the cost per service is important informa-
tion. Since internal IT will in some ways be competing with external provid-
ers, transparency about cost is essential. To enable a pay-per-use costing
model, with the correct chargeback to the business, you need good insight into
the metrics of IT. You need insight into the cost of operating IT, but also into
how that cost is related to business relevant metrics such as transactions,
products or users. Integration and orchestration costs of cloud services should
be included in this model. Establish a cost allocation structure and charging
model that covers all services, regardless of whether it is a cloud, a non-cloud
or a partial cloud implementation, and you’ll be ready for whatever cloud
solution will be implemented along the way. Even if you will never adopt a
true pay-per-use model in your organization, the insight is indispensable for
proper fnancial control and justifcation.
Renew service management to guide delivery
When services are delivered by the cloud, it impacts both technical and oper-
ational processes (see chapters 5 and 6). The way a solution is realized
changes, so this needs to be guided by architects. But what also changes is the
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responsibility for operational processes, their character or nature, and meth-
ods of service delivery and control. This means that service management is
highly impacted by the cloud. Due to the dynamic nature of cloud computing,
service portfolios become more dynamic and at the same time this leads to
the existence of more underlying contracts. Services from different providers
and of different types need to be presented to the business as a consistent set.
Incident, problem and change management all need to be carried out in dif-
ferent forms, depending on the nature of the cloud services and the underly-
ing service-level agreements. When renewing service management to make
it ready for the cloud, at least the following processes should be changed to
be capable of carrying out the task:
Service portfolio management—as mentioned above, a service portfolio •
with standardized services defned in business terms. The necessary steps
to establish this portfolio are already described above. The responsibility
for keeping this portfolio up to date resides within service management.
IT service continuity management—ensure service operation continuity. •
Distributed implementation of solutions (to different cloud providers) can
put continuity at risk, if it is not guarded carefully.
Help desk, incident and problem management—a governance structure •
and organization that are prepared for a high level of automation, the
alignment of help desks with cloud providers, incident and problem man-
agement processes and agreements on problem management processes
with cloud providers in order to be able to trace and solve problems (root
cause analyses).
Change and release management—mature and standardized processes •
that can be automated to support the rapid provisioning of cloud-related
services.
Availability and capacity management—a capacity forecasting model that •
can take into account the characteristics of cloud-related services.
Technology changes
Figure 9.6: Technology changes due to cloud computing
Technology Changes
Experiment
Security
Integration
New Platforms
Programming Model
Automation
Virtualization
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After talking about all the changes to process and business, one could almost
forget that there is a technical impact as well. If you embrace cloud as an
internal model, the technical focus might be on virtualization frst. If you focus
on using a public service, you might start with addressing security or integra-
tion. And there are some other concrete actions that lie ahead in the technol-
ogy space:
Experiment!
Try some things out. Create a solution with the API’s of public cloud. Self-
provision some Amazon compute power and run an app on it. When experi-
menting, take the cloud concepts for a test drive and look in particular at the
characteristics that will matter most:
Security and performance. •
Managing and operations. •
New features, new possibilities. •
Most developers love experimenting with the latest online platform, so if you
give them half a chance they will come up with creative solutions. And if you
can fnd a contained business-relevant experiment, involve the business in
your experiments.
Virtualize your datacenter
It is one of the low-hanging fruits that most organizations have already
grabbed: start a project to fnd redundant hardware and reduce the number
of physical machines. This will bring down the cost and increase your agility
right away. It has fairly limited business visibility, if you do it right, and it will
help you prepare for the addition of external resources, too.
Automate manual IT processes
When the pressure on cost remains high, and competition from cloud service
providers increases, the cost of basic IT operations needs to approach that of
the external providers. The most important way to do this is to automate as
much as possible in the IT operations domain. Look for the manual processes,
the exceptions or the recurring tasks that have not yet been automated.
Migrate existing applications
In a number of cases, you will fnd a business case to actually migrate some
existing applications to the cloud. If a cloud service is available that offers the
functionality currently offered by the existing application, you would enter
into a data-migration project. If no ready-made alternative is available, you
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9 Creating Your Roadmap
can port the existing application to a cloud platform. In this case, a review of
the application architecture is in order: how does the application handle
threading, scaling, transactions, storage etc. Then select the cloud platform
that fts the application best, and still conforms to the business case.
Get ready for integration
If you already have an SOA, you will probably have some sort of enterprise
service bus. When adopting cloud computing, integration will become one of
the core technical skills of the IT department. Providing a stable, mature
integration platform that can scale to the demands that cloud may bring will
be critical to the core function of IT. At least consider master data manage-
ment, identity & permission management, policy management, workfow
orchestration, messaging facilities and reliable network connectivity. If your
integration approach is not yet perfect, this is the time to address it. It pre-
vents the creation of a patchwork of unmanageable, incompatible platforms.
Without a sound integration approach, anarchy and chaos stand waiting at
the door bearing their gift of increased complexity, which will lead to reduced
fexibility and higher costs.
9.5
Inside-Out or Outside-In?
Generally, adoption of cloud computing comes from two sides. One is the IT
optimization path, looking to reduce cost and increase agility. The other is
from the outside-in, where complete user-ready solutions are introduced
because they address an urgent business need. The two different types of
adoption can, to some extent, be combined.
Adopt cloud outside-in
The frst approach is the simplest one in the beginning. It means that an
organization eclectically picks services and apps from the (public) cloud that
provide simple commodity or isolated niche services. Examples of commodi-
ties are email and teleconference services. Examples of niche services are
human resource test tools or collaboration portals from the cloud. These
applications can be acquired easily, mostly by subscription to a service. In
many cases, all one needs is a web browser and a credit card. The functional-
ity offered is often closely related to specifc user groups who carry out spe-
cifc tasks. However, integration of these applications with other applications
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is zero or close to zero. Although initial implementation is simple, lack of
integration and possible issues regarding data security and legal obligations
make this approach not suitable for all purposes. And, in the long run, a com-
plex patchwork of disconnected applications and facilities made up with ser-
vices from all corners of the cloud isn’t exactly a tempting scenario for most
organizations.
Adopt cloud inside-out
The second approach is much harder in the beginning, but seems to be more
future-proof in the long run. With this approach, internal facilities are trans-
formed into (private) cloud services by using virtualization techniques, service
orchestration and integration facilities, automated management facilities,
self-service portals and charging mechanisms, to name some important cloud
ingredients. This requires a complete revision of the IT landscape, to become
a landscape built upon the principles of service orientation. Once internal
services are in place (including orchestration and integration facilities), exter-
nal cloud services can be obtained and incorporated into the total set of IT
services of an organization. These might be application platforms and storage
facilities that extend beyond the frewalls of the organization’s own data cen-
ter, for disaster recovery, developing and testing or peak-load handling pur-
poses. They might be external service routines that handle portions of data
processing jobs in a real SOA fashion. This approach is thorough and only
provides clear benefts further down the road. It might be hard to explain to
business representatives and diffcult to interest them. At a minimum, a con-
cise set of principles and reference models is needed to support decision
making.
If an IT department would ignore cloud altogether, the outside in approach
would silently chip away at the core function of IT. Over time, less and less
would be asked from the IT department, but at the same time integration and
process integrity would probably suffer. A complete inside-out approach
might feel very safe and robust, but can suffer from the same ills that ulti-
mately gave SOA a bit of a bad reputation in the end: a lot of internal prepa-
ration that does not directly create new business opportunities. Cost saving
is wonderful, and increasing agility is much desired, but nothing creates
excitement like new business opportunities. That is why a combined approach
would be ideal: aim for the biggest improvements internally while scouting
the public cloud for new opportunities. Apply good architectural principles to
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9 Creating Your Roadmap
whatever decision you make, and over time the two approaches will have
reached the desired end state of a portfolio that consists of a mix of internal
and external services, brokered by an internal broker function.
9.6
Learning More About Cloud & Understanding
the Full Impact
Throughout the organization, more learning and exploration is probably in
order to creating a better understanding of cloud computing and its full
impact. There are many ways to do this, some of which were mentioned before.
There are some other concrete actions you can initiate:
Visit cloud computing events or training. There are many events that •
explain cloud and share best practices. CloudCamp is a so called “uncon-
ference” that comes recommended for enterprise architects and technical
people (see http://cloudcamp.org).
Get the legal team on board by initiating the discussion now. Help them •
explore the regulatory hurdles around cloud and fnd ways to overcome
them.
Do an IT or EA maturity assessment, to get third-party feedback on the •
strengths and weaknesses of your current IT or EA organization. Did you
implement SOA? Is the EA process working well? Learn where you are in
need of improvement before embracing the changes that come with
cloud.
Do a security scan, to fnd out if risk management, security policies and •
technologies are good enough to start thinking about integrating into a
cloud ecosystem.
Do a round of fact fnding around the (im)possibilities of cloud computing. •
Visit the QA and testing teams, the people who operate existing applica-
tions. Their input and even objections can be very valuable to establish the
impact cloud computing will have for you.
Many of the concepts are not new, and often it is the case of simply applying
what we already know. The discussion about cloud gives you the opportunity
to set some things straight where correction was sorely needed. Spreading
knowledge of how IT could and should work is an important part of that:
establish the ideal to initiate the journey towards it.
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9.7
Cloud in Your Organization
Figure 9.7: Summary of changes due to cloud computing
Technology is the basis of cloud, but the changes span the organization. The
priority and depth at which the different aspects will be executed will vary
from place to place. In general, you’d adopt everything in the diagram roughly
from left to right, allowing some experimentation and initial steps before
starting the cloud initiative in earnest. And though your exact order of adop-
tion might differ, there are of course interdependencies, for example between
virtualization and chargeback, or between automation and self provisioning.
9.8
Living in the Cloud
In the end, cloud will follow the path of SOA: SOA is no longer in the public
eye as an important theme, but it is still the leading model for designing dis-
tributed systems. Cloud is fast becoming simply “one more option” for IT, but
its true value will be found by the companies that turn an IT trend into a busi-
ness opportunity. Along the way, cloud will have pushed IT to a new level of
professionalism, making it an organic part of the business at the same time.
But its promises are not fulflled without effort. It requires hard labor, coor-
Technology Changes
Experiment
Security
Integration
New Platforms
Programming Model
Automation
Virtualization
Business IT
Interaction Changes
Enterprise Architecture
Evaluate Value
Business-IT Strategy
Services Portfolio
Innovation Committee
Business Changes Increase Tech-savvy
Dynamic Partnering
Self-provision
Experiment
New Budgeting
Business Technology
Ecosystem Company
“Data as the new frontier”
IT Process Changes
Broker Function
Cloud-Buy-Build Strategy
New IT Metrics
Quality Process
Chargeback
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9 Creating Your Roadmap
dination, collaboration and creativity, together with clear milestones and
acknowledged and celebrated successes. The steps suggested do not stand
alone, nor can they be taken separately. They are related to each other and
need to be carried out in an iterative process that slowly incorporates pro-
cesses, people and technology. Remember, it’s not a migration, it’s adopting a
new paradigm, a journey. Choose your destination and pace. And then set sail,
if you are not under sail already. Good luck!
177
About IBM
International Business Machines Corporation, abbreviated IBM, is a global
technology and innovation company headquartered in Armonk, New York,
and with locations in 170 countries. Utilizing its business consulting, technol-
ogy and R&D expertise, IBM helps clients around the world become “smarter”
as the planet becomes more digitally interconnected. That includes working
with organizations and governments to build systems that improve traffc
congestion, food safety, the availability of clean water, and the health and
safety of populations. IBM invests more than $6 billion a year in R&D, holding
more patents than any other US company. IBM offers a wide range of infra-
structure and consulting services; a broad portfolio of software for collabora-
tion, predictive analytics and systems management; and the world’s most
advanced servers and supercomputers.
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About Sogeti
Sogeti is a leading provider of professional technology services, specializing
in Application Management, Infrastructure Management, High-Tech Engi-
neering and Testing. Working closely with its clients, Sogeti enables them to
leverage technological innovation and achieve maximum results. Sogeti brings
together more than 20,000 professionals in 15 countries and is present in over
100 locations in Europe, the US and India. Sogeti is a wholly-owned subsidiary
of Cap Gemini S.A., listed on the Paris Stock Exchange. For more information
please visit www.sogeti.com.
About Sogeti and the cloud
Sogeti provides a set of cloud services based on a fully automated environ-
ment, with “triple play” solutions on site, near site, rightshore, matching your
specifc business needs, with appropriate service level agreements and billing
models. We cover the entire spectrum of the ongoing transformation cycle
generated by cloud computing, from consulting to operation. For more infor-
mation please visit www.sogeti.com/cloud.
179
The People Who Contributed
This book could not have been created without the suggestions and feedback
from many contributors. We would especially like to thank the following people
for their time and insights, which helped shape this book and the interviews in
it: Måns Adler, Mike Blake, Ben Gorter, Rob Keemink, Tony Kerrison, Johan
Krebbers, Scott Orn, Paul Suijkerbuijk, Laurentiu Vasiliu, and Hennie Wesseling.
Also, special thanks go to the many clients that we have worked with or that we
have interviewed about their experiences with cloud computing. Tony Kontzer
did wonderful work to create the case descriptions. Finally, we thank the IBM-
Sogeti alliance team, which played a crucial role in making this book possible.
Below you will fnd the list of this book’s authors and contributors. Feel free to
contact them directly!
“Doing cloud without EA is like ﬂying without air trafﬁc control.”
Martin van den Berg
Sogeti, The Netherlands
Martin van den Berg is Architecture Service Line Manager at Sogeti
Nederland B.V. and an expert in the area of enterprise architecture. He
has worked as lead architect in organizations like ABN AMRO, ING and
Shell. Martin is one of the founders of DYA (Dynamic Architecture) and author of several
books on enterprise architecture and SOA. Martin is chairman of the Architecture Sec-
tion of the Dutch Computer Society and represents Sogeti in the Open Group. He has
written many articles and presented papers at many conferences on EA and SOA.
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/mjbkvandenberg
“Cloud computing cannot be ignored. Business users are more and more in ﬂavor
of using cloud applications. As CIO, be the ‘Cloud Implementation Ofﬁcer’.”
Jean-Michel Bertheaud
IBM, France
Jean-Michel is based in Paris. He has been the Executive IT Architect in
charge of Sogeti World Wide for many years. His core responsabilities
are to maintain, build and co-ordinate the global technical activities and
relationships between Sogeti and IBM. Working closely with local IBM teams that
support Sogeti, he is a trusted advisor to Sogeti, particularly to technical leaders and
innovators on the global stage. Jean-Michel has been driving innovation and the devel-
opment of innovative solutions using IBM components like “Innovation Jam” hosted in
IBM’s Dublin Cloud Computing Center in 2008, followed in 2009 by an internal collab-
orative tool project. In 2010, Jean-Michel has been the lead architect and IBM project
director for the Sogeti Cloud Center in Paris.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/jmbertheaud
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“Success with cloud requires strategy and architecture, not just more architects—
rather, more strategy and architectural awareness.”
Per Björkegren
Sogeti, Sweden
Per Björkegren has the roles of CTO and consultant within Sogeti
Sweden. He spends most of his time on consulting, especially in the
areas of IT strategy and enterprise architecture, but he also regularly
presents seminars and speeches.
Sometimes Per dives deeper into solution architecture and design. Since 2004, three of
his efforts have led to Microsoft .NET Awards. Even though Per hasn’t been doing
programming since the early 90’s, he still ranks on Computer Sweden’s list of the most
important developers in the country. Most recently he was listed as #36.
Per is the founder and chairman of Swedish Enterprise Architecture Network, SWEAN,
which today has about 600 members and is mainly administered on LinkedI n. He was
also co-author of the book SOA for Proﬁt.
http://se.linkedin.com/in/bjorkegren
“Every success and failure starts with the end user.”
Rik den Boogert
Sogeti, The Netherlands
Rik den Boogert is Service Line Manager Implementation and is
responsible for the development of Implementation Services within
Sogeti Netherlands. Rik has gained experience over more than 30 years
in the IT industry, covering many management and consultancy roles in numerous
branches like utilities, fnance, telecom and government. Nowadays he is more and
more focused on the end user, since that is where success and failure starts. That is an
obvious truth that is easily forgotten. This is also the case with cloud computing. It is
Rik’s mission to bring this thinking to the hearts and minds of the IT people.
http://nl.linkedin.com/pub/rik-boogert/3/693/50a
“How could we manage cumulonimbus without creating a storm?”
Flavien Boucher
Sogeti, France
Flavien Boucher is Senior Consultant and Global Lead IBM Cloud
Collaboration. He is based in Washington DC, USA.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/favien-boucher/12/917/760
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About the Authors and Contributors
“Cloud computing is the biggest change in the IT industry in years. It’s the ﬁrst
time that Business and Technology have been so close. For companies, the question
is not when do they need to go in the cloud, but what will happen if they don’t.”
Bernard Huc
Sogeti, France
Bernard is a Certifed Enterprise Architect with 30+ years of experience
in IT. Bernard is working on the cloud computing services offered by
Sogeti. Working in enterprise architecture for 15 years, Bernard has led
the Global Architects Community of Capgemini Group where the day-to-day activities
have been revolving around service-oriented architecture, business-IT alignment and
cloud computing for a while. As part of this activity, Bernard has contributed to many
innovation initiatives of the Capgemini group. Bernard is used to working in the inter-
national environment and has been involved in many international initiatives for
customers around the world. Bernard is skilled in training and coaching people, and is
often asked by the media to speak on IT trends.
Bernard is based in Grenoble, France.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/bernardhuc
“It’s an architect’s job to debunk the hype without missing opportunities. That
applies to the cloud, for sure.”
Daniël Jumelet
Sogeti, The Netherlands
Daniël is an experienced infrastructure and architecture consultant
from The Netherlands. With a background in networking technology
and information security, he developed an innovative infrastructure
architecture methodology. He is the author of the book DYA|Infrastructure, Architecture
for the Foundations of IT (Dutch) and has published several articles on the subject
internationally.
Daniël advises and coaches several large organizations in the application of infrastruc-
ture architecture and practices it by directing complex infrastructure change processes.
Next to his focus on architecture, he also has a keen interest in human sciences and
philosophical issues, particularly regarding the interactions between people, society
and technology.
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“Making cloud work for an organization, and not just add complexity and risk to
their IT, is the most exciting opportunity and challenge facing the CIO today.”
Mark Kerr
IBM, United Kingdom
Mark Kerr is an IBM Executive IT Architect, working primarily with
computer services industry clients and partners. He has been inter-
ested in the cloud since its early days, and believes it has the same
potential to change the industry as the PC did in the 80’s and the Internet did in the
90’s. Mark is currently engaged in building a cloud services platform for a major IT
service provider, and is also a member of IBM UK’s cloud strategy team. He is an Open
Group Distinguished IT Architect and Chartered IT Professional.
http://uk.linkedin.com/pub/mark-kerr/4/41b/820
“Cloud computing is a natural evolution of the IT environment that is here to stay,
although it will keep on evolving as we see its strategic component rise before us.
The forecast is: ‘Cloudy, with a chance’.”
Alfonso Lopez de Arenosa
Sogeti, Spain
Alfonso Lopez de Arenosa, Senior Manager at Sogeti Spain, is respon-
sible for cloud sales on the IBM platform for Sogeti Europe. Alfonso has
been in IT for more than 20 years, having covered every position in a
datacenter, from being a console operator to being in charge of a datacenter, and hav-
ing watched the evolution of the mainframe as part of the evolution of his own career.
He has successfully managed the Sogeti-IBM relationship during the past 6 years, and
is now taking the lead to develop cloud sales in Europe, with the goal of creating mar-
ket awareness and helping customers to take the right steps into the cloud.
http://es.linkedin.com/pub/alfonso-lopez-de-arenosa/1/502/776
183
About the Authors and Contributors
“Cloud is not really a revolution but rather an evolution, bringing several service
provisioning and consumption capabilities together, leading to the dream of having
IT available anywhere, at any time… while respecting work-life integration…”
Eric Michiels
IBM, Belgium
Eric Michiels is Client Technology Advisor in the fnancial services
sector in Belgium. His role is to design solutions addressing business
and IT challenges of banks, insurers and clearing houses. These solu-
tions encompass cloud services, service-oriented architectures, and business process
management. Working as an IT professional since 1986, Eric has acquired a broad
experience in multiple industries, on several technical platforms and with many appli-
cation architectures, while applying several development paradigms. Eric is Open
Group Certifed Distinguished Lead Architect and a TOGAF 9 Certifed Professional.
He is also IBM Liaison of the Belgian GSE Architecture Working Group and a fellow at
Leuven University.
http://be.linkedin.com/pub/eric-michiels/0/513/818
“From a technology point of view cloud is an evolution, combining several develop-
ments of the past decade; from a business and users point of view it is a true
revolution, changing the impact of IT on our lives forever.”
Ron Moerman
Sogeti, The Netherlands
Ron Moerman is Technology Offcer for Sogeti’s Infrastructure Division
in The Netherlands, and plays a leading role in developing the division’s
solutions and strategy. Drawing on more than 25 years of experience in
IT, from mainframe to PC systems, Ron likes to discuss the possibilities of new technol-
ogy, like cloud, for IT and business, helping customers develop the right strategy for
their infrastructure. In the last 12 years he has developed several commercially suc-
cessful solutions for Sogeti. A few years ago, he published a book on InFraMe® that
covers an infrastructure project methodology, flling the gap between process and
technology. Currently, Ron is one of the frontrunners on cloud topics within Sogeti
Netherlands, helping customers and colleagues assess the limits and possibilities of
cloud solutions.
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/ronmoerman
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“Cloud computing should not be used as an excuse to forget everything about good
IT practice and business fundamentals. They still apply!”
Brian Naylor
IBM, United Kingdom
Brian Naylor is the EMEA lead for cloud computing in the Cloud
Engagement team within IBM Software Group. Responsible for being
the catalyst for starting cloud projects with customers in Europe, Brian
has 2-3 years of experience designing, implementing and enhancing private and public
cloud solutions. With over 100+ customer engagements, Brian and the Cloud Engage-
ment team have gained great insight into the reality of cloud computing in the business
world.
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/banaylor
“To make sure that clouds do not just ‘block the sun,’ good insight in the required
services and service levels from a business perspective is a prerequisite. Key to
successful use of cloud services is to know why and how to use them.”
Bert Noorman
Sogeti, The Netherlands
Bert Noorman is Service Line Manager at Sogeti Nederland B.V. In that
role he is responsible for business development in the area of business
processes and process management. He has broad experience: he
combines business and IT aspects and works in multidisciplinary environments, as the
integration of disciplines becomes more and more important. He is the author of sev-
eral publications, including a book on quality assurance in projects.
http://nl.linkedin.com/pub/bert-noorman/3/532/b8
“As clouds in nature vary from simple to complex formations, so too in computing.”
Liam Ó Móráin
Data Fonics, Germany
An engineer by training and an entrepreneur by vocation, Liam has
extensive business experience, having run his own company, worked as
a management consultant and served on the boards of several compa-
nies. He is a trusted advisor to several senior executives and a recognized thought
leader on the future of the Internet. As a result of his many years working in the US
and Europe, he has cultivated an impressive network of contacts on both sides of the
Atlantic. He is currently working on a start-up which will employ cloud computing to
provide real-time analysis of new feeds.
http://de.linkedin.com/in/liamomorain
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About the Authors and Contributors
“Calling it ‘cloud’ combined a bunch of trends into a coherent package that is a
signiﬁcant step forward for business technology.”
Erik van Ommeren
Sogeti, USA
Erik is responsible for VINT, Sogeti’s international research institute, in
the USA. The research institute publishes and organizes events around
trends such as open innovation, new media, Web 2.0, the commoditiza-
tion of IT, IT governance, collaboration and cloud computing. Erik is an analyst with a
broad background in IT and experience ranging from software development using
many different technologies to enterprise architecture and executive management. Part
of his time is spent advising organizations on transformation projects, architectural
processes and innovation. Erik is also a trainer, speaker at seminars and author of
several books and articles. Erik is based in Washington, DC.
http://www.linkedin.com/in/erikvanommeren
“I am using the cloud to create my collection of interesting architectural objects
directly in a geomap in the cloud, so that I can use it as a local directory and guide
anywhere, and without my wife’s pressure to arrange it.
The most impressive thing about evolutions in a global context, including cloud, is
that it is driven by its own ambition and cannot be predicted.”
Paul Poelmans
Sogeti, Belgium/Luxembourg
Paul graduated as an architect and civil engineer where he was trained
in combining creativity and technical realism in solutions meant for
people. He is integrating these skills in his current job as Leader of
Expertise in “innovation through Application Lifecycle Management and Architecture”
to develop solutions for customers. Paul has worked as a consultant all over the world.
He has trained people and presented on different topics, focusing on both technology
and the impact of technology on the people who use it. He is combining his current job
with the role of managing the global partnership between Oracle and Sogeti.
http://be.linkedin.com/in/paulpoelmans
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“The cloud business model will change IT in a commodity for the business to use as
tap water; turn it on and off when needed.”
Ewald Roodenrijs
Sogeti, The Netherlands
Ewald is a member of the business development team within Sogeti
Netherlands and the global lead of the Test Cloud within the Sogeti
Group. As the global lead around the Sogeti Test Cloud he is respon-
sible for the services around software testing and cloud computing services. He’s also
the co-author of the book TMap NEXT
®
—BDTM, a speaker at (international) confer-
ences, an author of various national and international articles in expert magazines and
has created various training courses.
http://nl.linkedin.com/in/ewaldroodenrijs
“As a child I was said to have ‘my head in the clouds,’ but now my feet are ﬁrmly on
the ground so I can help others innovate in the cloud.”
Pascal Sire
IBM, France
Pascal Sire is an innovation catalyst at IBM, teaming with strategic
alliances and enabling global systems integrators to adopt innovative
technologies and social networking. Previously, Pascal was a technical
expert in new technologies at IBM. He was also an Internet entrepreneur before the
dotcom bubble burst. He is an engineer and holds an Advanced Masters in Innovative
Design (TRIZ expertise), and now extends his business interests to strategies for
intellectual capital and innovation. Pascal is also a trainer, seminar facilitator and
author of several articles on these matters. Pascal is based in Strasbourg (headquarters
of the European Parliament).
http://www.viadeo.com/profle/00222h9y9ebk4km4
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“Cloud will have an impact on how we perform business, how we do IT and how we
go about our everyday lives. The question is no longer if or when, it’s a question of
now and how.”
Jimmy Sterner
Sogeti, Sweden
Jimmy Sterner is a senior enterprise architect at Sogeti, Sweden. He
has a broad background in IT business where he has been active in
many felds such as system development, system design, business
object modeling, process modeling, system architecture, project management, IT archi-
tecture and enterprise architecture.
Jimmy Sterner is TOGAF certifed and has a Swedish IT-architect certifcate. He has
specifc knowledge and interest in the felds of integration and information architec-
ture. Throughout his career he’s been working in the area between IT and business,
with questions concerning the harmonic alignment and understanding between the
two.
http://se.linkedin.com/pub/jimmy-sterner/1/472/93b
“Cloud computing is one of the most impactful transformations organizations will
go through in the next decade, fundamentally changing the dialog, we see today,
between Business and IT.”
Sunil Talreja
Sogeti, USA
Sunil Talreja is the Vice President for Sogeti’s Enterprise Solutions
Consulting Practice in the USA, and plays a lead role in services inno-
vation, industrialization and consultant enablement. Sunil has served
15 years with the Capgemini/Sogeti Group, during which he has
advised clients on business and IT transformation leveraging information and technol-
ogy capabilities, including analytics, service oriented architecture, convergence of
media, mobile and mobility, and process automation to name a few. He specializes in
the design and implementation of strategies and capabilities for organizations to pro-
actively leverage emerging and impactful technologies for leapfrog business advantage.
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/sunil-talreja/1/7a3/81a
About the Authors and Contributors
189
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195
Index
A
Amazon 67
Apple 82
application area reference model 105
application reference model 105
architecture principles 102
B
Bambuser 39–41
barriers to cloud computing 119–130
BBC 147
Berners-Lee, Sir Tim 142
Bizer, Prof. Dr. Chris (DBpedia) 149
Bradshaw, Mike (Google Federal) 121
broker function 167
business, changes caused by cloud computing 30
business case 161
business innovation 41–51
business patterns, new 45
business reference model 104–105
business technology 13, 24, 80
~ indicators 46
match ~ with cloud computing 47–50
shift from information technology to ~ 41–45
business user, impact of cloud on 62–64
business value 122
C
Carr, Nicholas 12
Caslione, John 11
Cast Iron 80
change, reluctance to 129
chargeback 57
CIO, role of 14, 29–30
cloud:
adopting inside-out 172
adopting outside-in 171
196
Seize the Cloud
diffculties of integration 33–34
hybrid ~ 33–34
private ~ 33, 35, 86
public ~ 34, 88
virtual private ~ 34
cloud computing:
analyzing impact of ~ 83–86
barriers 119–130
benefts and costs 64
causes of ~ 24, 24–26
complexities 26
contribution to business innovation 14, 41–51
defnition 23
effects of ~ 11–15, 30, 55–66
focus on function instead of construction 111–114
impact on fow of goods and money 59–60
impact on providers and consumers 62–68
impact on service management 88–91
low-hanging fruits of ~ 37
match with business technology 47–50
need for coherence and integration 95–96
need for long-term strategy 32–33
overall impact 55–58
ownership versus usage of IT assets 26
reasons for popularity 27–28
user expectations 28–29
cloud provider:
not future-proof ~ 127
Component Business Model (IBM) 82–85, 105
consumer, impact of cloud on 62–68
control 125
cost allocation 168
costs 122–123
cyborg organization 42
D
data:
examples of ~ in cloud 144
legal issues 150
linked ~ 143, 144, 148, 150
197
Index
technical complexities 151
datacenter 170
Data.gov 145
DBpedia 149
DYA (DYnamic Architecture) 98
checklist 100
E
economics of IT 55–68
Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) 135
email, alternatives to 44
enterprise architecture 49, 95–111, 164, 166
dynamic ~ 97–99
principles 102
~ reference model as map for cloud adoption 103–107
skills needed 101–102
experience economy 44
expertise 127
F
fow of goods and money 59–60
G
goods, fow of 59–60
Google 66, 67, 68
green IT 35–36
H
Hadoop 151
hardware, impact of cloud computing on 55–58
hardware provider, impact of cloud on 67–68
heat map 86
Hyatt Hotels 19–22
hybrid cloud 33–34
I
IBM 45, 66, 67
Component Business Model 82–85, 105
workload recommendations 163
ICTU (Dutch government agency) 70–72
198
Seize the Cloud
ING 116–119
innovation process 163
integration 124, 171
diffculties of ~ 33–34
role of IT 79
IT:
~ as app store provider 82
~ as orchestrator of services 80
~ as venture capitalist 81
green ~ 35–36
industrialization in ~ 24
role of ~ 14
self-service 76
shift to business technology 41–45
IT capabilities:
~ for cloud era 80–82
mapping for cloud 82–85
IT constitution:
drivers 76–80
new ~ 75–88
IT department
changes needed in ~ 49
impact of cloud on ~ 65–66
IT economics 55–68
ITIL 79, 88–91
K
Kotler, Philip 11
L
license model 56
Lighthouse Capital 52–54
linked data 143, 144, 148, 150
Linking Open Drug Data (LODD) 144
Linthicum, David 62
lock-in 123–124
long-term strategy:
need for ~ 32–33
199
Index
M
market-based pricing 57
marketplace, transparent 57
Microsoft 66
migration 124, 170
mobile computing 45
money, fow of 59–60
N
NoSQL 151
O
Oracle 66
ownership versus usage of IT assets 26
P
pattern:
application hosting ~ 112
defnition 111
Peracton Ltd. 73–75
performance 125
private cloud 33, 35
virtual ~ 34
provider, impact of cloud on 62–68
public cloud 34
Q
quick wins 162
R
reference model:
application ~ 105
application area ~ 105
~ as map for cloud adoption 103–107
business ~ 104–105
capability modeling as starting point 104–106
essential modeling as starting point 108–109
regulations 121
reluctance to change 129
reputation 126–127
RightScale 80
S
SaaS 24, 25
Salesforce 66, 67, 76, 131
SAP 66
security 120
semantic web 142
service, impact of cloud computing on 55–58
service management 88–91, 168
service portfolio 168
service provider, impact of cloud on 65–66
Shell International 17–19
Smarter Planet (IBM campaign) 45
SOA 24, 25, 78
software, impact of cloud computing on 55–58
software provider, impact of cloud on 66
stability 125
subscription model 56, 66
systemic risks 128–129
T
technology:
~ shift from IT to business technology 41–45
use of ~ 42
U
user expectations 28–29
V
virtualization 25, 32
virtual private cloud 34
W
web, semantic 142
Web 2.0 28, 137, 141
Web 3.0 142

E
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Erik van Ommeren Martin van den Berg

With

Jean-Michel Bertheaud

IBM France

Per Björkegren

Sogeti Sweden

Rik den Boogert

Sogeti Netherlands

Flavien Boucher

Sogeti France

Bernard Huc

Sogeti France

Daniël Jumelet

Sogeti Netherlands

Mark Kerr

IBM UK

Alfonso Lopez de Arenosa

Sogeti Spain

Eric Michiels

IBM Belgium

Ron Moerman

Sogeti Netherlands

Brian
Naylor

IBM UK

Bert Noorman

Sogeti Netherlands

Liam
Ó Móráin

Data Fonics Germany

Paul Poelmans

Sogeti
Belgium

Ewald Roodenrijs

Sogeti Netherlands

Pascal Sire

IBM France

Jimmy Sterner

Sogeti Sweden

Sunil Talreja

Sogeti USA
Seize
the
Cloud
A Manager’s Guide to Success with Cloud Computing
For hype-weary IT and business man-
agement, this book will be a breath of fresh
air. We all know that cloud is the future of
commoditized IT (not all IT), but how do
we get there, and how do we make sure it
all hangs together? The worst thing any
manager could do is listen to the industry
hype that once again promises a new IT
utopia. This book deals with the real issues
and offers a mature roadmap for cloud
adoption—no organization should embark
on a cloud strategy without it.
Martin Butler
Founder of Martin Butler Research
In this book Erik van Ommeren and
Martin van den Berg break out the most
important concept of cloud computing, how
it works within your enterprise and how to
plan for it. I would recommend this book to
anyone who needs to both understand cloud,
and deﬁne a strategy.
David Linthicum
CTO Blue Mountain Labs
Threaded with real-world stories, tough
questions, and pragmatic advice, this book
is an essential guide for business leaders
tackling the next great computing revolution.
Don’t leave home without it.
Emily Nagle Green
Chairman, Yankee Group Research, and
author, Anywhere
A Manager’s Guide
to Success with
Cloud Computing
Seize
the
Cloud
Cloud is here and ready to be used. It is
now one of the many concepts available
to organize IT, and it is here to stay. The
conversation about cloud computing has
turned away from pure technology, and
now it focuses on the business side, the
economics and the governance aspects.
There are still some challenging questions
around cloud, but nothing that dismisses
the concept as a whole. For example, the
question is no longer “is cloud secure,” but
more “can I use this speciﬁc cloud solution
for my speciﬁc situation.” And as soon as
we become speciﬁc, the mist of the cloud
evaporates: it becomes very clear that good
concepts, services and solutions are within
arms’ reach for everyone.
Seize the Cloud will serve as your guide
through the business and enterprise archi-
tecture aspects of cloud computing. In
nine chapters, and in a down-to-earth way,
cloud is woven into the reality of running
an organization, managing IT and creating
value with technology. Along the way, the
concept of business technology is intro-
duced as a new kind of interaction between
business and IT. Also, a new look at the eco-
nomics of IT is described. The book strikes a
positive note without turning evangelical or
overly optimistic: it does not shy away from
the barriers that could stand in the way of
adoption. To provide a ﬁrm dose of reality,
the book explores eleven cases in which
leading organizations share insights gained
from their experiences with cloud.
The authors and contributors of this book
have a proven track record on the topic and
several have written prior books on cloud
computing, enterprise architecture, SOA,
infrastructure architecture, quality assurance
or business process analysis and design. The
sponsoring organizations, IBM and Sogeti,
have a strong business partnership and
work together in serving clients using many
innovative technologies, among which cloud
computing plays an important role.